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catloud · 5 years ago

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Greta Gerwig is The Best One

I grew up loving, living and breathing two films: Little Women, with a wild and passionate Winona Ryder, and Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility. The middle of three sisters, I saw our dynamic as a trio in both of them. We cast ourselves as these women, making our own Pickwick Papers and putting on plays in the garden, just like our beloved March sisters. My own teenage solitude revolved around moody walks in the hills near my house on a Scottish island, calling Willoughby’s name in the rain, usually to the soundtrack of Greenday or Alanis Morisette or Damien Rice. These were the raw materials I had to craft my identity with. Sisters. Sisterhood. Love. Passion. Power. Freedom.

And, just as I was conditioned to pick a favourite Spice Girl or colour of Starburst, I immediately made Jo and Marianne my respective LW and S&S favourites. But Jo is something special. She is, after all, the patron saint of all aspiring writers and country bumpkins who move to the city for adventure. I feel that.

I know there’s something about Jo. Why did I make her The Best One?

What about Meg? Lovely Meg! Naturally maternal and equal parts severe, sensible and sweet, she gracefully bears the burdens of societal pressure and familial responsibility as the pioneering eldest child, while also taking responsibility for wrangling her more wayward sisters. She is a Mini Marmee, and lord knows we all love Marmee.

Or gentle Beth, wistful and musical, always striving to keep the peace between more the more overwhelming personalities within the household, and trying to make the world a better place for those less fortunate in times of extreme uncertainty. She loves everyone and everyone loves her.

Or Amy? Artistic and refined Amy, who matches Jo in talent and strength of will but is a thousand times more socially savvy. She makes the rules of the world (for women like her) work as she intuitively knows how to wield and tame them, while Jo fights them kicking and screaming all the way.

The March sisters are timeless because they pose a question that has refused to leave me alone – what am I supposed to want? Jo is our natural Girl Power era heroine. She is all of the great feminist moments in one person. She’s Jane Fonda getting arrested at a protest. She’s telling a mansplainer to shut the fuck up. She’s not taking “because you’re a woman” for an answer, ever.

She’s wild and proud, recklessly emotional and deeply ambitious. And there it is. Ambition. The most masculine of fatal flaws that is at first admirable before it devours everything in its path, stopping at nothing till the whole world has been swallowed and spat out again.

We can’t all be Jos. Stoking and sustaining that level of craving and chasing is absolutely exhausting. And when what you want comes to you, and comes crashing down again because nothing is forever, then you’ll see the holes left behind. Creative projects and the pursuit of the next thing can be Polyfilla for the gaping, untreated hole left by perpetual loneliness. No one wants to look into its mouth for long, and so the great cycle begins again.

And I think about this now, because Hollywood’s Remake Olympics feels necessary this time. I need to see Jo again.

I find myself thirty, solo and skint. I have yet to find a like-minded soul who is more Alcott’s Laurie and less Austen’s Willoughby, and I’ve spent most of my twenties pursuing a career that I have loved but I’m convinced hasn’t loved me. I’ve hunted opportunities, scraped by when cash was tight with a knot in my stomach and instead of chasing something brilliant and wonderful, I have been obsessed with not failing. Failing isn’t an option. I don’t know what else to be instead.

Why was my hometown not enough?

Why did I have to want more?

These questions are Greta Gerwig’s territory, an artist who has made herself very much at home with stories about women at crossroads who sense good things on the horizon, but struggle to get their bearings. She is an artist I watch with so much strange pride, horrified that so few women are staking claims and taking names in a director’s chair and yet, there she is. There she has been, for years.

As a writer and as a performer, Gerwig understands how painful it is to be in a perpetual state of becoming. Frances Ha - the 2012 film she starred in and co-wrote with director Noah Baumbach - is a masterpiece. I resisted watching it for years, because I was scared of seeing myself in it. I was right, but I didn’t need to be scared. It’s filled with the same mundane intimacy in Little Women - girls sitting in bed together, making plans for a big, varied, wild life. Gerwig and Alcott write love stories about wanting to love life and have life love you back. Her eponymous character is the earnest, awkward and mis-stepping heart of a film that scrambles up the crushing economic realities of modern life with whimsical and chic French New Wave aesthetics, adding glimmers of Fame and Footloose for fun. “Scrambling” is the most appropriate adjective for her. A precariously-employed dancer, she tells successful and self-assured best friend Sophie in the film’s deeply intimate opening montage “I tried to make a frittata and it’s really more of a scramble”. And we all know you can’t make an omelette without cracking eggs. They feature again in her Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe-winning Lady Bird. Arguing with her mother, Saorise Ronan’s Christine/ Lady Bird asks why she can’t cook breakfast, to which the excellent Laurie Metcalf replies “Because you take too long and make a big mess and I have to clean the whole thing up.” Eggs. Metaphors for messy lives, and a nod to the mothers we came from. The mothers! They’re poets and they don’t even realise. I love Gerwig and Alcott’s big-hearted mothers, so afraid for wayward daughters who want more than they can provide and say things like “I didn’t raise you like this!” when they act up. When we act up. I know you didn’t, and I’m sorry.

At the helm of Lady Bird, Gerwig is even more masterful at painting sisterhood and choices with a bold intensity, coloured with vivid metaphorical visuals. Juxtaposing the joy of a first kiss with a hushed conversation about tight finances gives economic hardship and anxiety the same weight in the drama as romantic entanglements. Lady Bird’s mother is often visibly crushed by her daughter’s ungrateful and embarrassed recognition that they aren’t wealthy, and “wrong side of the tracks” cliches are shown to be careless, throw away words for painful and inescapable realities. Gerwig crafts anxious and relatable narratives around being economically downtrodden and feeling less sure-footed in the face of those who have hit certain milestones. Her work is peppered with the many little audacious deceptions we pull off that conceal deep-rooted despair; the greater truths can be reached when we take sex out of the equation, or throw it in; the sorrow of being left behind. But she always gives us joy, too. Writing the names of boys we love on the wall and painting over them when don’t anymore. Going to view houses, trying on other lives for fun, because it’s wonderful and poignant to deliberately get lost in the woods to simply feel every now and then.

She makes me nostalgic for that particular sweet spot in my adolescence. There is so much I hated about being a teenager, but I was restless and hungry and I miss that person. I still want to believe that the world is full and vibrant, and that I deserve a slice of it nut sometimes I fear that I will never feel brave or excited again. But Gerwig is familiar with this feeling and Little Women, in essence, explores all of these fears. Her films show women living their lives differently and overcoming the battles that ensue, and this makes her the perfect wrangler for the March sisters, each with their own diverging life paths but all of them equally valid.

Of course, to call it an exploration of modern feminism isn’t wholly true. Feminism that isn’t intersectional isn’t feminism and Little Women as a historical piece is incredibly white and heteronormative. But, there are lessons to be learned about what being a woman today looks like. It takes guts to be a mother and raise children, or to pursue the life you desire even if it takes you thousands of miles from what you know and who you love. She understands that choosing a creative career - and continuing to choose it in the face of all its difficulties – is to peer into the lion’s mouth. Her films have a simmering undercurrent that points a finger directly at the harsh reality and unspoken acceptance that art is for the rich, and the pursuit of culture indicates a sense of superiority or reaching above station. And it will always take courage to break free from expectations, even if those expectations come from the people you love most.

I refuse to pick a favourite this time.

Meg March is coming home.

Beth March is your favourite album on vinyl.

Amy March is playing poker, and winning.

And Jo? Jo March is every foolish text and all sparkling, heartfelt conversations.

If I have to pick My Best One, it’s Gerwig herself. She is a storyteller who handles life’s tiny disappointments and triumphs like precious ornaments. She is a master of making mountains out of moments, of carefully handling stories that give women space to live untidily and brilliantly, of big and small rituals we do to root the person we’re becoming to the person we used to be, and to the people, places and things we’ve loved, always.

I feel safe in her hands. I couldn’t trust my March sisters to anyone less worthy, and I can’t wait to see these women I love through her imaginative, sensitive and determined eyes.

#Greta Gerwig #Little Women #Jane Austen #Jo March #filmmaking #sisterhood #feminism #film #nostalgia

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