Little Women: Looking For Christmas In The Margins

Lucy Vickers

We all have that one film (or films) that, upon viewing, immediately makes us think of Christmas. As soon as the festive season is upon us, and we begin to itch with anticipation for Christmas day, we stir up excitement by watching our seasonal favourites. Typically, this comes in the form of a mid-November viewing of Home Alone, Love Actually or Elf, but for me, the magic of Christmas is signified most in the slightly less overt. As such, nothing else screams Christmas to me like Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women (1994). Not the type of film frequently discussed by cinephiles – a fact that can perhaps be partially attributed to the story’s exclusive attention to the lives of women — the power of Armstrong’s work manifests in its resonation with the viewer on an emotional level, as well as its evocation of Christmas feelings through music.

Little Women is the second of three (well-known) adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868-89 novel. Set in Concord, Massachusetts, the story follows the lives of four sisters as they experience growing up, marriage, death, birth and heartbreak. Christmas is invariably woven in the film’s narrative, particularly because Christmas itself is very important to the members of the March family, as is evident from the very outset. The opening scenes begin with Jo (Winona Ryder) narrating over multiple shots of snow-covered Concord before panning to the March family home.

The following scene shows us Marmie (Susan Sarandon) returning home with a letter from father and, as the sisters sit with Marmie next to a crackling fire amongst the family decorations, it truly feels like you are sat in their living room experiencing Christmas with them. Little Women is quintessentially a Christmas film through themes of love and family that exude from every scene, and the way it draws you in to become part of each and every one.

Another well-crafted aspect of the 1994 version of Little Women is in Thomas Newman’s excellent score. He expertly captures the playful nature of some scenes – like the ‘Snowplay’ scene in which the sisters have a snowball fight – to the more emotional scenes like the finale as Jo runs to Friedrich (Gabriel Byrne) in the rain.

Newman is particularly adept at creating melancholic and haunting main themes to be used frequently within the score – as he also does in the soundtracks for Finding Nemo (2003) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Some of this is achieved by his preference for piano, strings and woodwind over louder-sounding instruments, as well as a fondness for shallow acoustic texture, often relying on piano alone to capture the tone of the scene he is scoring. On a more personal level, there is something about his music that makes me extremely emotional, which I put down to Newman’s expert orchestrations, but also my association between the music and my own experience of Christmas. As a film about women, directed by a woman, written by a woman, adapted from a woman’s book, and with a score created by an underrated composer, Little Women is often underappreciated, both within film circles and as a Christmas film in its own right. Nevertheless, when I go home in a week, it will be this film that my family and I sit around to watch together.