If you are trying to find a bit of the USA at least vaguely similar to Ireland you might choose Massachussetts, but the effectiveness is still going to have its limits. And so to a more major lowish-budget downside of this otherwise-basically-British version of "Little Women" from Heidi Thomas and Vanessa Caswill.
Another relates to occasionally wobbly accents - e.g. from Sir Michael Gambon, though of course not from American-dwelling Brit Dame Angela Lansbury. Emily Watson as the mother does fine with this, and there are Irish accents in there as well - authentically enough for 1861 over in New England.
The semi-autobiographical novel of the same name from Louisa Alcott came out in 1868-9, even as it was writing about the period a few years earlier, by which time Alcott was just into her 30s. She penned a tale that resonates rather with me, as I likewise seem to have 19th- and early 20th-century family that operated on the margins of huge world events, but were (for both good and ill) not quite directly involved in them.
This is a clear feature of this story, also as presented here, with father at first absent as a Padre in the Union Forces of the Civil War. Back home life goes on with its ups and downs, yet there is a great deal of power in these more minor events never truly that far from the divisive War, even as that is still - thankfully - an entirely distinct world.
What is more, the makers of this 3-part mini-series do everything in their power to stress the drama and emotion and power and meaning present in those less earth-shaking things that it works to portray.
Apart from occasionally-doting views of long female hair, petticoats and so on (!) - and faces featuring those amazing FRECKLES - we can truly observe, but also vicariously "feel" the adoring looks the strikingly-beautiful Jo (Maya Hawke) gives Laurie (Jonah Hauer-King) - even as she insists she cannot/will not/does not love him and will never be his "in that way" when HE declares HIS love for her. Who knows if the man was born without a pe**s, but the purity and beauty of their feelings suggest powerfully some closeness that is far beyond infatuation, lust or the demand for marriage. It's spellbinding and something to be envied at least in the context of these few minutes of our looking in on their situation, which may well have applied to the life of author Alcott herself (on whom Jo is modelled).
But we again feel things so very clearly when shy, agorophobic, socially-awkward sister Beth (Annes Elwy) fights conflicting emotions as she longs to go and play the piano at the nearby house of Laurie's uncle, yet is too inhibited to do so. Yet this is at the same time the daughter among the four prepared to devote herself to dutifully helping a poor family that ultimately infects her with scarlet fever and brings her to death's door.
And then there is youngest daughter Amy (played by Kathryn Newton) - who takes such wilfully determined delight - and shows so little genuine remorse - when she exacts revenge on Jo by burning page after page of her painstankingly-written novel. Later, for her stubbornness and "attitude" she also receives 3 beats of the cane on her hand from her teacher, and it's by no means a nothing moment. The acting here too is fine, even if Newton is surprisingly less venerated by the camera than Elwy and Hawke.
Not to be outdone, oldest sister Meg (Willa Fitzgerald) has HER superb moment as the proposal of marriage she receives from Laurie's tutor John - as he is just about to go off to fight for the Union - is disturbed, but also reinforced, by the abrupt arrival of Lansbury's no-nonsense tell-it-like-it is dowager Aunt March (whose life has also had its earlier tragedies). Seriousness collapses into farce, only to morph again into a moment of defiant and triumphant victory...
While the first episode is perhaps the most powerful, even as it is in some ways the least eventful (see what I mean?), each part has its huge, raw, emotional power (conjured out of rather little except the clarity and simplicity-complexity and purity of the close-family-and-friends situation). And of course it also offers all viewers an overwhelming chance (welcome or not) to wallow in nostalgia for their own period of adolescence!
Watched in 2020, the series's presentation of how those people routinely lived (and died) with the possibility of catching a fatal contagious disease is salutory. How lucky we were to get unused to that circumstance present through almost all of human history! And how difficult it might prove to to back to that...
Anyway, in pandemic world there are things I can choose to watch, and feel a strong need to watch, and others that leave me entirely cold. This at-times disarmingly beautiful version of "Little Women" is firmly in the first category, and - to my mind at least - it is filmed and acted and written and directed in such a way that, at moments at least, it reaches up to the sublime...
I don't need to ask for more than that.
Another relates to occasionally wobbly accents - e.g. from Sir Michael Gambon, though of course not from American-dwelling Brit Dame Angela Lansbury. Emily Watson as the mother does fine with this, and there are Irish accents in there as well - authentically enough for 1861 over in New England.
The semi-autobiographical novel of the same name from Louisa Alcott came out in 1868-9, even as it was writing about the period a few years earlier, by which time Alcott was just into her 30s. She penned a tale that resonates rather with me, as I likewise seem to have 19th- and early 20th-century family that operated on the margins of huge world events, but were (for both good and ill) not quite directly involved in them.
This is a clear feature of this story, also as presented here, with father at first absent as a Padre in the Union Forces of the Civil War. Back home life goes on with its ups and downs, yet there is a great deal of power in these more minor events never truly that far from the divisive War, even as that is still - thankfully - an entirely distinct world.
What is more, the makers of this 3-part mini-series do everything in their power to stress the drama and emotion and power and meaning present in those less earth-shaking things that it works to portray.
Apart from occasionally-doting views of long female hair, petticoats and so on (!) - and faces featuring those amazing FRECKLES - we can truly observe, but also vicariously "feel" the adoring looks the strikingly-beautiful Jo (Maya Hawke) gives Laurie (Jonah Hauer-King) - even as she insists she cannot/will not/does not love him and will never be his "in that way" when HE declares HIS love for her. Who knows if the man was born without a pe**s, but the purity and beauty of their feelings suggest powerfully some closeness that is far beyond infatuation, lust or the demand for marriage. It's spellbinding and something to be envied at least in the context of these few minutes of our looking in on their situation, which may well have applied to the life of author Alcott herself (on whom Jo is modelled).
But we again feel things so very clearly when shy, agorophobic, socially-awkward sister Beth (Annes Elwy) fights conflicting emotions as she longs to go and play the piano at the nearby house of Laurie's uncle, yet is too inhibited to do so. Yet this is at the same time the daughter among the four prepared to devote herself to dutifully helping a poor family that ultimately infects her with scarlet fever and brings her to death's door.
And then there is youngest daughter Amy (played by Kathryn Newton) - who takes such wilfully determined delight - and shows so little genuine remorse - when she exacts revenge on Jo by burning page after page of her painstankingly-written novel. Later, for her stubbornness and "attitude" she also receives 3 beats of the cane on her hand from her teacher, and it's by no means a nothing moment. The acting here too is fine, even if Newton is surprisingly less venerated by the camera than Elwy and Hawke.
Not to be outdone, oldest sister Meg (Willa Fitzgerald) has HER superb moment as the proposal of marriage she receives from Laurie's tutor John - as he is just about to go off to fight for the Union - is disturbed, but also reinforced, by the abrupt arrival of Lansbury's no-nonsense tell-it-like-it is dowager Aunt March (whose life has also had its earlier tragedies). Seriousness collapses into farce, only to morph again into a moment of defiant and triumphant victory...
While the first episode is perhaps the most powerful, even as it is in some ways the least eventful (see what I mean?), each part has its huge, raw, emotional power (conjured out of rather little except the clarity and simplicity-complexity and purity of the close-family-and-friends situation). And of course it also offers all viewers an overwhelming chance (welcome or not) to wallow in nostalgia for their own period of adolescence!
Watched in 2020, the series's presentation of how those people routinely lived (and died) with the possibility of catching a fatal contagious disease is salutory. How lucky we were to get unused to that circumstance present through almost all of human history! And how difficult it might prove to to back to that...
Anyway, in pandemic world there are things I can choose to watch, and feel a strong need to watch, and others that leave me entirely cold. This at-times disarmingly beautiful version of "Little Women" is firmly in the first category, and - to my mind at least - it is filmed and acted and written and directed in such a way that, at moments at least, it reaches up to the sublime...
I don't need to ask for more than that.