Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women (Theatrical)

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I can´t imagine this film working as well as it does without the right actors, and all of them do well. Molly Schreiber plays the teen Louisa May, Emily Strikeman the child Louisa May, and Haley Garvin the toddler Louisa May, and so there´s a fullness of life lived here that again seems lacking in other biographies. Further authenticity comes from filming at Orchard House (the family home where Alcott wrote Little Women), Fruitlands Museum (site of Bronson Alcott´s failed utopian experiment), Wayside (a Little Women and later Hawthorne home), the Ralph Waldo Emerson House, and other Concord, Lexington, and Boston locations.

"Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women" is a cradle-to-grave biography that focuses as well on Bronson and his experimental schools. We learn about the family dynamics and the relationship between the sisters that would eventually be transformed into the March family adventures in Little Women, and we also begin to appreciate how "connected" the family was. Neighbors included Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau, and this film emphasizes Alcott´s unique education for a woman. We follow the family through financial hard times, and endure right along with them the death of Elizabeth (Anna Finkelstein) and the stubborn antics of British reformer Charles Lane (Peter Haydu), whose strange ideas cause Bronson and Abigail´s estrangement and Louisa May´s resentment. We trace the development of Louisa May´s writing career, her volunteer service (and subsequent bout of Typhoid Fever) as a nurse during the Civil War, her trip to Europe with her artistic sister May (Marianna Bassham), her brief attraction to a Polish man (Lewis Wheeler), and yes, the years she was finally able to spend living a life of relative contentment.

Helping to add perspective are writer Geraldine Brooks, Orchard House director Jan Turnquist, and Alcott scholars Sarah Elbert (S.U.N.Y. Binghamton), John Matteson (John Jay College), Joel Myerson (Univ. of South Carolina), and Daniel Shealy (Univ. of North Carolina). And this group of academics even gets in some "zinger" lines. Adding to the interest is that this isn´t just the biography of a writer. Louisa May Alcott lived on the cusp on unique experiences. "I was an abolitionist at the age of three," she recalls, and a feminist from birth. "I long for battle, like a warhorse when he smells the powder," she says, later confessing, "I think my natural ambition is the lurid style." This uncommon woman drinks from a flask, holds her own with philosophers, and runs in full dress for the sheer pleasure of it. Alcott, who spent time with Emerson in his library and with Thoreau at Walden Pond, is an obvious free spirit who can be cantankerous and spiteful at times--images we don´t often see in our canonical writers, much less a female one. Yet, it was Bronson Alcott who gave her the room to grow and be herself. He did not try to break her spirit, and his role in shaping her is as evident as her mother´s, when you watch this film.

Director Porter really only makes one misstep, as far as I´m concerned, and that´s with her unfortunate decision to incorporate quaint cut-out animations at moments when we´re to assume entry into Alcott´s mind when she thinks she´s going crazy, and, worse, when we get a sampling of critical responses to one of her books. Tonally and visually it just feels too different from the rest of the film. But thankfully these moments are few, and this accomplished film manages to do what most literary biographies cannot: it moves us. We leave with an appreciation of Louisa May Alcott and a better understanding for her place in U.S. cultural as well as literary history. In the end, that´s quite an accomplishment. Mark Twain would be proud.

On a DVD Town scale I´d give "Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women and 8 out of 10.

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