Little Women (2019) picks up where Lady Bird left off: the question of how to continue living when you feel like you were only ever meant to exist as a teenage girl

I'd never seen this problem portrayed anywhere until I saw the end of Lady Bird, but now I realize it's always been one of the foundational questions of Little Women and Gerwig just brought it out because it's one of her major preoccupations as an artist

it's often mistaken for a millennial fear of failing to achieve one's potential, but that's not how I read it at all; I see it as a shocked, pained recognition that one's teen-girl self was the best version of one's self

that the teen-girl iteration of you was the purest, truest, most authentic expression of your soul, with the deepest capacity for joy and delight in the world and in yourself; you took up space in the world, you sparkled

the shattered look on Saorsie's face at the end of Lady Bird -- that panicked glance around the city, the thousand-yard stare -- is (in my interpretation) her realization that the "Lady Bird" version of herself has died and isn't coming back

and has been replaced by this anxious wallflower of a woman whose main concern is not looking stupid in front of men; and tragically, she KNOWS this, but knowing isn't enough to make it stop

so this is the question on which Lady Bird ends, and now it's the central subject of Little Women: how do you make a meaningful life for yourself if you peaked as a teenage girl? (or, in Laurie's case, if you never even got the chance to BE a teenage girl)

Meg/Emma Watson is obviously the weakest character/cast member, but on my second viewing I thought she embodied this problem really well: in all the flashback scenes she looks RADIANT, and in the present-day scenes she looks so fucking sad, depleted, dead inside

and her life is objectively good! John Brook seems like a wonderful husband, their marriage is a happy one, she loves her kids, she even has her family nearby, she's very lucky...but her eyes are dead like Saorsie's at the end of Lady Bird

to some extent it's a universal problem (we grow up, we put away childish things), but it's also very much a political problem (when society slots you into the "woman" category, it necessarily kills at least part of your soul)

on my second viewing, I thought the ambiguous ending of Little Women was proposing two possible answers to the question of how to continue living; and surprisingly, I don't think it had as much to do with the question of marriage, per se, as everyone thinks it does

what struck me on my second viewing is that the "Jo is married" ending is a vision of COMMUNITY, practically a commune: the whole family is together, surrounded by children, everyone pursuing their talents and dreams

I cried to notice that Meg seems to be teaching an acting class, Amy is teaching painting, and Laurie is holding the baby; everyone is together (except Beth), it's the closest possible approximation of a total return to adolescence

it's like writer-Jo's gift to herself and her sisters: a vision of the best of all possible worlds, and a not-entirely-impossible vision at that

but then the other ending, in which Jo is a novelist who writes "Little Women," is a different sort of happy ending, a more capitalist one: Jo has remained true to herself, but I think she's also terribly alone, and that's the trade-off she's chosen to make in this timeline

neither ending feels entirely right (in one, Jo is unconvincingly married and a thwarted writer; in the other, she's alone and her once-close family is fragmented), and I think maybe that's the point -- NOTHING will entirely bring back what Jo and her sisters had as girls

that's why (thanks to @anyamicaela for pointing this out, I missed it on my first viewing) the second-to-last shot is of all four March sisters as little girls, holding toy swords in the air like musketeers -- dissolving to the final shot of the film: Jo, alone

real talk: I'm crying again just typing out these tweets. Little Women means SO MUCH to me