Transcendental Meditation

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The March family is Santa Clueless. They are transcendentalists, so there are no angels in their outfieldmaybe just Ralph Waldo Emerson out for his evening stroll. They are the creation of a 19th century New England lady who never heard the phrase "family entertainment" but in her innocence imagined that by telling the story of one family going about the ordinary business of life, she could divert and instruct other families.

You have to worry about Little Women. As a movie, it is exotic in all the wrong ways for today's market -- all hoop-skirts, candlelight and genteel language. In Louisa May Alcott's world, heavy snowfall was a big-time special effect, sausages for breakfast made for a woozily joyful Christmas, and it was omnipresent death, not omnipresent divorce, that threatened childhood's serenity. Can a movie that faithfully reflects this life -- at once harder and more innocent than ours -- and does so without condescension, preachment or gross sentiment, make its way in our times?

It deserves to. For director Gillian Armstrong and writer Robin Swicord have fashioned an entrancing film from this distinctly unfashionable classic. They do not so much dramatize the passage of the four March sisters from girlhood to womanhood as let it unfold. Over the years the sisters must cope with a father's absence (when he's not off fighting the Civil War, he's lost in philosophical musings), a mother's bustling idealism, romances appropriate and inappropriate, the constant threat of poverty and illness. Eventually Jo (the luminous Winona Ryder) embraces art and an older man (Gabriel Byrne); Meg (Trini Alvarado) embraces domesticity; Amy (played as a child by Kirstin Dunst of Interview with the Vampire, as a young woman by Samantha Mathis) embraces -- and shapes up -- the boy next door. And poor retiring Beth (Claire Danes, who stars in the TV series My So-Called Life) embraces death -- with exemplary courage.

Armstrong and Swicord have made the girls' mother (Susan Sarandon) something more of a feminist exemplar than she originally was; still, her social activism and her insistence that her children must claim their freedom do not seem anachronistic for a Concord woman of her time and class.

Little Women gently but firmly asks us to penetrate its 19th century disguises and discover something of ourselves hiding in the dim past. There has always been a kind of awkward exuberance in the way this story looks life straight in the eye and sweetly, soberly embraces its basic experiences and emotions. It is this unspoken moral strength, which is not to be confused with the vulgar, politicized moralism of our time, that permits it to transcend its gentilities of expression and its lack of structural grace. And grants this lovely cast, these intelligent and passionate filmmakers, the year's unlikeliest triumph.