It took some stepping to find this thread but I'm glad I did. More than two years later here I am because I finally saw -- in its entirety -- the 1994 version of
Little Women.And, matilda, I loved it. I truly loved it.
I guess I'd only seen film clips and formed a partial opinion, but I have to say that this version immediately leapt to the top of my list -- the late great Kate H. notwithstanding.
Where to start? The setting was perfect, the art direction was perfect, the New England flavor was perfect, and the costumes were so good as to be invisible. No one looked like they were tromping around in corsets and
Masterpiece Theatre duds -- the clothes simply looked like what the characters would have worn, every day, no big deal. Lovely.
And everyone looked related and kudos to the casting director: Trini Alvarado (so simple and lovely as Meg) looked as though she could actually have been Winona Ryder's older sister, Clare Danes looked as though she could have been their shy and dark-haired little sister, and Kirsten Dunst -- who was an adorable, bratty
hoot as young Amy -- had the same coloring as Susan Sarandon as Marmee, so that worked as well. (She was so funny it was a bit of a disappointment when she grew up and morphed into Samantha Mathis.)
As for Winona Ryder, on whom much depended, well . . . as a delicately pretty young woman she was no one's childhood idea of the rawboned and irredeemably awkward Josephine March, but I say she made it work. I'd somehow forgetten what a wonderful actress she is (case in point
The Age of Innocence), and she quickly won me over with her sensitivity and clarity.
And for once -- thank you! -- we got a dishy Laurie worth drooling over in Christian Bale. (Made a nice transition between his stunning childhood performance in
Empire of the Sun and the superheroes and creepy serial killers he's been playing since then.) And yes, inuvik (hello!), Eric Stolz made a fine John Brooke, even in just a few brief scenes. Mary Wickes, that wonderfully crusty character actress who's stolen every scene she's been in since about 1935 (including
Sister Act and let me say that you have to get out of bed early in the morning to steal scenes from the likes of Whoopi Goldberg and Maggie Smith), was the quintessential Aunt March: I'm guessing this was one of her last performances and it made a fine capper to a splendid career. Oh, Gabriel Byrne as Professor Bhaer was no one's idea of a German (by the end of the film he'd pretty much given up on the Deutsche accent and sounded like his old Irish self) but he's always pleasing to look at and there's nowt wrong with that.
I liked the script, a lot. Oh, maybe we didn't have all the lines we grew up on but they got the emotional truth right and maybe in the end that was more important. Susan Sarandon's feminist Marmee even seemed to work for me -- closer to Louisa May Alcott's beliefs than Marmee in the book -- but she was simple and strong. She can be flamboyant and she can be simple -- I love her when she's simple. And I blubbed like a baby when Beth died, which you really can't say about the previous versions.
Here's the thing about the old MGM 1930s version: Kate is the only good thing in it. The sisters are simpy and sentimental, Marmee is a joke, and Douglass Montgomery, who played Lauire, is best described as
wet. The 1950s MGM version, with June Allyson as Jo and Peter Lawford as Laurie, is virtually unwatchable. (One elderly friend once described MGM movies of that era as ribbon candy; just looping along all shiny and smooth and sweet.)
In the end? My vote goes to Winona & Co. Kind of makes me wish they'd kept the whole gang together and done
Little Men!
BTW, matilda, isn't the director, Gilliam Armstrong, an Oz gal? Well, she took on an American classic about which everyone has an opinion and
she got it right.
Good on her.
Thoughts, anyone???
She's physically tiny, she has delicate features, she's feminine -- how is that Jo March?! Personally, I think Katherine Hepburn came a helluva lot closer -- certainly physically -- and I only eschew the 1930s version because just about everyone else in the cast was lousy, top of the list that feeb who played Laurie. (Then again, nothing is as crappy as the 1950s MGM version where June Allyson played Jo. 
)
).
