The actor:	Saoirse Ronan
The character:	Jo March
The film:	Little Women
The line:	“And I’m so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is good for. I’m so sick of it. But I’m so lonely!”

There are so many good adaptations of existing text in the American movies of the 2010s. One of the ten most important stories of the 2010s in popular film has to do with the crippling reliance on intellectual property to make any kind of profitable picture, so ironically this is the same decade that gave us a number of wonderful adaptations of material that we all thought we knew. The Social Network and Lincoln, written by two of American’s favorite screenwriters, turn massive bricks of text into some of the more memorable, narrative stories of the decade. Literature became Carol and If Beale Street Could Talk and Annihilation. There are even some sequels and spinoffs that have very solid screenplays, like Creed or The Last Jedi.

Look too at True Grit, an adaptation which had already won its iconic his long-awaited Oscar back im 1969, which has lyrical, rhythmic dialogue to the hilt. It must have felt like a Rooster Cogburn played by John Wayne, directed by late-stage Henry Hathaway, would be the last word on the subject. It wasn’t. The same is true of Little Women, which was decried by the famously self-aware MCU and DCEU sets as being an unnecessary adaptation of a work that had been made too many times already. Little Women has a screenplay as good as any of the movies I’ve listed already, and better than most. It turns out that Greta Gerwig didn’t want to do exactly the same thing as the previous Little Women adaptations, amazingly enough, and so this is structured and focused differently than any of its predecessors. It’s also beautifully written.

You could go to the movies for four or five years and never get a scene written so well as this one.

Written well because of the words, but that’s the easy part. Written well because it suits the actors who have to say the lines. Written well because the words fit into the mise-en-scène, because they complement the aching autumn setting where what was lush withers, because these are the kinds of words that people dressed so would say. Written well because it’s a culmination of so much feeling that’s been through the movie, but which only expressed itself before with pubescent cracking voices. And for as magnificent as this scene is, the best single line of the film is after this. What makes it the best single line it owes, in part, to this scene.

The phrase “have it all,” with its connotation of a woman’s ability to be personally, professionally, romantically, and domestically successful, is going to turn fifty sometime this decade. It’s an old-fashioned phrase, not quite bygone because there are still a great many women who grew up with it, but the phrase you hear about now is “glass ceiling” more than “have it all.” Just because the idea is old, much older than its coining, doesn’t mean that it can’t be made new any more than Little Women couldn’t be made new. When she says that line that got badly decontextualized by its ubiquity in the trailers, a person who has very little expresses a wish for more. In that blue-gray attic, mournful and near tears, Jo finds the irony of her life. She is the ultimate individual, not merely different from everyone else but obsessed with staying that way. A child surrounded by other children can do these things largely without consequence. An adult whose childhood has evaporated around her, whose sisters have passed on in one way or another, realizes that though there is a lot more a woman is good for than love, love might also be good for this woman.