"Great Expectations" is based around the odd conceit of taking the plot of Dickens's novel and updating it to late 20th century America. Apart from Joe and Estella, all the names of the characters have been changed. Pip becomes Finn Bell, Miss Havisham Miss Dinsmoor and Magwitch Arthur Lustig. Mrs Joe is Maggie, Bentley Drummle Walter and Jaggers Ragno. The plot follows the same basic outlines as in the novel. Finn is an orphan, cared for by his older sister and her boyfriend Joe, a fisherman on Florida's Gulf Coast. As in the book, Finn helps an escaped convict. As in the book, he becomes friendly with Estella, the adopted daughter of a wealthy reclusive lady. As in the book, he receives a financial windfall from a lawyer acting on behalf of a mysterious benefactor (who later turns out to be the convict). And as in the book, he falls helplessly in love with Estella, now a beautiful but icy young woman.
The trouble with the film's central conceit- which is why I described it as odd- is that "Great Expectations" resists being translated into the modern age. Like most great nineteenth-century novels it is firmly rooted in a particular time and place, in this case London and South-East England in the early 19th century. (Shakespeare's plays, which do not have the same attachment to a specific time and place, are generally easier to transfer to a modern setting). Even when it was written it was something of a period piece, being set not during the 1860s when Dickens wrote it but rather during his own childhood in the 1810s and 1820s. Dickens is therefore describing social structures and institutions- many of them essential to his plot- which were forty years in the past even at the time of writing and which have no equivalents in modern society.
When the film-makers try and find such equivalents, they end up doing violence to Dickens's plot. The most significant changes are those made to the characters of Finn/Pip and Lustig/Magwitch, which is unfortunate as the Pip-Magwitch relationship is perhaps the most important in the novel. In the novel, Pip's great ambition, which he realises through Magwitch's generosity, is to become a "gentleman". This is a word with many shades of meaning, but Pip uses it to mean little more than a rich layabout, someone who has no need to work for a living and so can spend his life drinking, gambling and hanging out with other young men of a similar outlook. Once Pip has realised this ambition, he becomes an odious snob, ashamed of his lowly origins, of his adoptive father Joe (who has always treated him with great kindness) and even of his benefactor when he discovers who that person is. Finn, on the other hand, has a much more elevated and laudable ambition, dreaming of becoming an artist, and Lustig's benefaction enables him to set up in a New York studio.
Magwitch- an unsuccessful petty thief- was a failure as a criminal who acquired his wealth honestly in Australia. Lustig, however, is not a reformed character but a gangster on the run whose sources of income are still dishonest ones. This has implications for the way in which we view the relationship between Lustig and Finn. Pip, whose good fortune is based upon nothing more than a stroke of luck (he helps Magwitch our of fear, not out of compassion) snobbishly looks down upon the man who has made that fortune possible by working hard and honestly. Finn, however, seems strangely unmoved by the fact that his good fortune is based upon sources of wealth tainted by criminality. This moral dilemma might have made for an interesting theme, albeit one not found in Dickens, but the film-makers largely ignore it. Unfortunately, they also ignore the moral concerns which were at the heart of Dickens's novel.
No film based upon a literary text can ever be 100% faithful to its source, especially one taken from Dickens whose novels were known for their complex plots and for casts of literally hundreds of characters. David Lean's great version of "Great Expectations", although considerably more faithful to the text than this one, simplifies the plot considerably- for example, it omits the Orlick sub-plot altogether. The important point, however, is that Lean fully understood what Dickens was trying to achieve and remained faithful to the spirit of his work. There is no sign of such understanding or fidelity in Alfonso Cuaron's film.
There were some good things about the film. It was attractively shot, particularly the scenes set in Miss Dinsmoor's crumbling mansion "Paradiso Perduto". (As a number of reviewers have pointed out, Cuaron seems to have a particular liking for the colour green). There were effective cameos from Robert de Niro as Lustig and Anne Bancroft as Miss Dinsmoor. The main parts, however, were less well played. Ethan Hawke played Finn as a sort of love-sick puppy: I could never conceive of him as a talented artist. Gwyneth Paltrow was well able to convey Estella's haughty, glacially beautiful exterior, but there is no sense, as there was with Valerie Hobson's performance in Lean's film, that this is a mask she has been forced to put on by her adoptive mother and which hides an insecure, vulnerable person inside.
I have never seen any of Cuaron's Spanish-language films, but I was very impressed by his English-language "A Little Princess". (That film also involved transposing a classic English novel to America, although it kept the book's period setting). His "Great Expectations" was, however, not in the same class. It departs from Dickens's novel too radically to succeed as a cinematic version of a literary text. On the other hand, it sticks too closely to his plot to succeed on any other level. My great expectations of it were disappointed. 4/10
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