Even before the dancing starts, there’s something about the way she runs.
Near the beginning of “Little Women,” Saoirse Ronan takes off. Cutting her way through a soberly dressed crowd, she flies across the pavement — blond waves bouncing — her face lit from within by a private smile. Her flapping coat makes it look as though she’s soaring on wings. She’s both of the earth and air; grounded yet light.
The reason Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” is so fresh and so piercingly alive? Its dancing spirit, in which even a run is a choreographic act.
In this adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel about four sisters growing up in New England during and after the Civil War, Ronan, as the willful Jo, has physical prowess: She’s sharp, she’s spontaneous and she’s more than a little bit wild.
As the close-knit March sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy — glide and tumble their way through the story, Gerwig orchestrates a kind of choreography that is as much physical as verbal. The actors have a way of bursting through space — and piling on one another, both in love and in anger — so that you’re able to feel their three-dimensional fullness. What Gerwig cultivates visually is choreographic pandemonium: restless, energetic and a hair shy of full-blown chaos.
And she makes spaces for actual dances — short, though never slight, gems — that were created by the contemporary choreographer Monica Bill Barnes. Flannery Gregg, a member of her company, is the associate choreographer.
Whether obvious or not, dance and its inherent musicality provide subtext for everything in “Little Women” — even the approach to dialogue. In an episode of IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Gerwig spoke about how she used slash marks to indicate when the next character would enter with a line so she could create the right speed and cadence. She described it as a technique for the actors to master. “It’s like being a dancer,” she said. “You find the freedom in the structure.”
It’s the same with a film that dances: Gerwig’s clear cinematic frame allows her to take risks with her approach to movement and to show something of a character’s inner world. When we first see Laurie, played by Timothée Chalamet, he is captured in a slow-motion walk that makes it seem as if he were drifting over water.
Chalamet’s Laurie, especially in the film’s first half, is something of a sprite; is it strange to say that his portrayal is in line with the hypnotizing spirit of the New York City Ballet dancer Allegra Kent? He has a loose silkiness, which makes his control — evident in his ability to balance and turn — so bewitching, especially the way it contrasts with Ronan’s rough-and-tumble fearlessness. Her physicality is straightforward in its strength; his is imbued with mystery.
Those qualities meet when, during a party, the pair sneak onto a porch for a private dance, an electrifying duet, choreographed by Barnes. As they dash from one window to the next — inside, proper dancing is happening — they unite in forceful muscularity, jumping and stomping with the rage and exuberance of teenagers on the cusp of adulthood.
Their duet is set to Dvorak in the film. But there’s a reason the actors appear to be so playfully modern: All of the dances were made using contemporary music. The porch dance was actually created to James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” (from the live recording of “Revolution of the Mind”). The sparkling look of the dance isn’t just about the feverish way they execute the steps, but it’s also about the musicality: We may not hear James Brown, but his timeless groove haunts this dance like a ghost.
In an interview, Barnes said Gerwig told her she wanted viewers to leave the movie feeling as if they had just heard David Bowie. (In the film, “Frances Ha,” Gerwig plays the heroine, a dancer; in one scene, she runs — just as exuberantly as Ronan does in “Little Women”— through the streets of Manhattan, leaping and spinning to Bowie’s “Modern Love.”) For Barnes that meant the film “has this contemporary feeling,” she said, “even though nothing indicates that in the costume or the music.”
That contemporary feeling is a triple threat: a weaving of physicality, the cadence of voices and even of fabric. The costumes, with their layered effect, seem to reference dance rehearsal clothes, from scarves draped loosely around necks to wrapped sweaters and chunky socks that have the look of leg warmers.
And Bowie’s music is there, if under the surface; “Let’s Dance” and “The Man Who Sold the World” were used when making the sequences featuring Meg at the debutante ball. But Barnes’s overall approach was to try to find “a way to make the story seem not so distant,” she said. “I wanted to find the right music to shape the energy of the scenes and of the dancing.”
A beer hall is the site of another electric dance, this one pairing Ronan and Louis Garrel as Friedrich Bhaer, the professor Jo meets while living in New York. Here, Barnes plays with the lively galop step; to choreograph it, she matched the movement to Aretha Franklin’s “Think.” The result is a thrilling, spiraling dance that spins the couple until you feel their inhibitions melting.
Barnes is adept at stripping away artifice and creating a safe and unpretentious space for non-dancers to move, as she did with her company’s collaboration with Ira Glass (“Three Acts, Two Dances, One Radio Host”) and in “The Museum Workout,” which led spectators on a physical tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You were sweating by the end.
Her experiments and the sense of community that she creates are palpable in moments of “Little Women” — namely that swirling beer hall dance, in which Ronan and Garrel are united by the joyful, intoxicating force of a turn. And then, just as quickly, it’s over. Dances bubble up and disappear in the movie, leaving behind glowing fragments of sensation.
Throughout, Gerwig celebrates her characters both in action and in stillness. In the final moment, Jo watches as her book is meticulously being made — with glue and a needle and thread — at the printer.
Here, as Jo chooses writing over marriage, Ronan performs the last dance. Holding the book, a satisfying shade of red, she squeezes her fingers around its cover with as much raw emotion as she poured into those ferocious, pounding jumps on the porch. It’s the simplest of motions, barely perceptible, but it synthesizes her pride and her grit. No touch is little in “Little Women,” where choreography is its sweeping force and where every movement counts.
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A Dancing Spirit Makes ‘Little Women’ Wild at Heart - The New York Times
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