No Spoilers
. . . . The best part for me was seeing what supposedly are the authentic interiors of Orchard House in Concord, where the Alcotts lived for some years.
It’s impossible for me to watch this without comparing every detail with the details of Alcott’s life and her works.
This mad love for Little Women as a feminist text has been manufactured to a great degree by a very slick PR machine. Previously, even now, in most social circles who have members who read books. the book was dismissed as sentimental, religious, preachy, moralizing and dull -- by women as well as men. But mostly, even men who read hadn’t heard of it. In my experience / hearing / reading, these include many of the women who dismissed The Handmaid’s Tale when it came out (and Margaret Atwood the writer) as Paranoid in Tin Foil — it can’t happen here! not now! not in this day and age! — and not sf! Anyway! But then it’s a hit on tv and suddenly they all forgot that they had even actively dissed it – and had dismissed Atwood as no real science fiction writer, who moreover didn’t know what sf is, so was guilty as charged of Wrong Thought.. But, by the time it hit tv it was happening here, and the war on women, like the war on everything sane, has only has gotten more critical for women and all of us since then too.
Nevertheless, that the Little Women film would be dismissed during this annual pre-Oscar manufactured frenzy is par for the course for women in the film industry, especially when in a cycle in which women again see themselves as mattering, with the right to speak about themselves, for themselves. I’ve watched this go down before, in the age of Thelma and Louise, Boyz ‘n the Hood, and Daughters of the Dust, hearing male film people muttering on NPR about how relieved they were that “all women and blacks” getting all the attention was over and they could return to being the masters of the film universe — and sans faux-apologizing for it any more.
The push back to the industry’s #MeToo cycle cannot be underestimated among rank and file and those who make up the juries and judges. Part of this current stream is caused though by Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story. This film played at the prestige art theater here, The IFC!* but Little Women did not. Marriage Story was the delight of male critics for reasons I cannot fathom beyond Baumbach being a (White Male) critics’ darling, going way back to The Squid and the Whale – which is also a domestic, middle-class, white family treatment, and which I haven’t watched either because I have developed a violent antipathy to such works as entertainment, particularly when made by white men. It’s as though nobody ever did a film about a marriage and divorce before, as if Kramer vs. Kramer and War of the Roses never happened, not to mention a list of others. This is billed as the domestic film, in possession of the best writing, acting, directing, casting.
Men can love Marriage Story without feeling girly because a man made it, directed it, and a Real (White) Man, Adam Driver, acted in it. We know Adam Driver’s a Real (White) Man because he’s in sf comix franchise flix (Star Wars) — and so is Scarlet Johanson (as Marvel universe’s Black Widow). Marriage Story has all the power of the Netflix money to promote the shyte out of it, as does The Irishman** — and we can see it on Netflix streaming too.
But the really odd thing about all this is — Baumbach and Gerwig are real life partners!
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/noah-baumbach-greta-gerwig-marriage-story-director-roundtable-1264219
Both have done relentless, constant promo of their films this year. But it’s Marriage Story that got the award noms this fall.
So the two domestic dramas a/k/a known as soap operas are pitted against each other, making in some circles for some serious meta film commentary indeed.
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* This is now moot as both films have been knocked out by the Real (White Man’s) Movie, a war movie of WWI, 1917. Everything else will go that other Real (White Man’s) Movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, whose title moreover, steals blatantly the title of another Real (White Man’s) Movie, Once Upon A Time In the West (1969) by that most real man’s movie maker evah, Sergio Leone, starring Real Reel Men such as Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson! Not to mention another Sergio Leone Real (White Man’s) Movie, Once Upon A Time In America (1984,) starring such real white men as Robert De Niro and James Woods. This latter, btw, has one of the most horrific, on screen sexual assaults of the sort called date rape. By the protagonist, whom we all care about so much . . . .
** The Irishman is now the only other Real White Man Movie left to challenge 1917 – gangsters vs. war! The true Real (White Man) Movie subjects. Guns and Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci and Al Pacino. It’s hard to be more Reel White Man that that!
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