Little
Women capped a year in which female-driven and directed movies topped the
box office, and yet awards still almost never go to films about women
There’s a scene toward the end of Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women, a starry-eyed update of Louisa May Alcott’s 19th-century novels, in which headstrong Jo (Saoirse Ronan), the character Alcott modeled on herself, anticipates decades of female creative doubt. A writer struggling to produce the popular, contrived sentimental stories of her day and slogging even harder to figure out what she wants to write, Jo doubts the ability of her own life experience to be compelling, asking her sisters: “Who will be interested in a story of domestic struggles and joys? It doesn’t have any real importance.” To which Amy (Florence Pugh), the youngest, responds: “Maybe we don’t see these things as important because no one writes about them.” Writing things, she says, “is what makes them important.”
Related: Sister act: how Little Women has come of age on the big screen