Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott; A new (the seventh!) film version

Thanks to a member for this unsigned assessment:

How do you like your saccharine? If almost undiluted, do go and see ‘Little Women’ at the Kino, or at mainstream cinemas. But prepare to be confused. The story we read in childhood ran chronologically, but the director of the film has evidently decided that this is far too boring for a modern audience, so she complicates the story of  ‘Little Women’ in a two and a quarter hour epic, with flashbacks in the lives of leading protagonists. Thus we see Meg, the most insipid of the March sisters, pleading with her husband for money to buy a length of dress material, long before she has actually married him. Amy, played as a pert 21st century gold-digger, complete with gravelly Greenwich Village voice, finally learns the error of her ways and gets Laurie, the boy next door, but not before he has proposed many times to her sister Jo, who changes her hairdo in every other scene from round about the middle of the movie. Confusing indeed. Of the other sisters, Beth, the one who dies, simply looks overfed and plays her part without recourse to any audience sympathy, especially when she is on the point of expiring. The only character who commands more than ten seconds’ attention is Jo. Saorsise Ronan is a good actress who makes as much as she can of the part, given that the writer/director, (Greta Gerwig), has decided she and her sisters will be portrayed with a default setting of hysterical response to any event taking place at any one time. Laura Dern, as Marmee is as insufferably wise and sugary as she is in the novel, and this role at least is true to how it was conceived by Alcott. The real stars are the Massachusetts landscape around Concord, with its breathtaking open views, and (at a guess) The Hamptons, where the beach scenes give off a living light from the sea and sand. The most hilarious character is poor needy Laurie, who is perfectly prepared to marry any one of the sisters who passes across his vision, and ends up, unhappily for him, with the least appealing of them. Meryl Streep plays Aunt March with a lot of strange whinnying noises and head-tossing, but at least with a degree of common sense. ‘You’ll regret it,’ she tells Meg, who is marrying John Brooke for the crime of being in love. And so will you, if you go to this film. Which is a pity, because like the curate’s egg, it is good in parts, but it is trying so hard for exuberance of spirit in its portrayal of the sisters that it ends up cracked and disappointing’.