"Great Expectations"

A strange, breathtaking and rapturous new updating of Dickens' 'Great Expectations.' Film review by Charles Taylor.

By Charles Taylor

Dec 30, 1998 | "DICKENS IS ONE of those writers who are well worth stealing," wrote George Orwell. In his dreams, Dickens couldn't have asked for more elegant or sympathetic thieves than Alfonso Cuarsn and Mitch Glazer, the director and screenwriter responsible for the strange, breathtaking and rapturous new updating of "Great Expectations."

They've changed Dickens' tale of a blacksmith's apprentice given the chance to become a gentleman in early 19th century Britain to the story of a young artist (Ethan Hawke) given the chance to become a success in 1990s New York. As in the novel, the hero has a secret benefactor whose munificence allows him to work toward his dream of becoming successful and thus winning Estella (Gwyneth Paltrow), the haughty beauty who hovers tantalizingly beyond his reach. Often, though, in movies, it's less important for filmmakers to be faithful to a novel's particulars than to its spirit. Reimagining a book can be just as true a mark of respect, a demonstration that the heart of a work is strong enough to support unexpected transformations.

The heart of Dickens' novel beats strong and true through all the elisions and changes of Cuarsn and Glazer's film. Each of them has already proven himself an inspired adapter. Cuarsn infused his film of Francis Hodgson Burnett's fairy tale "A Little Princess" with a lush sensuousness, and Glazer (in collaboration with the late Michael O'Donoghue) transformed "A Christmas Carol" into the satirical "Scrooged" without sacrificing the spirit of that most wonderful of ghost stories. They emerge here as wizards. "Great Expectations" offers the thrill of people taking chances, beautifully reckless chances that all pay off by a combination of confidence, skill and daring. The English marsh country where the hero grows up has become Florida's Gulf Coast; his name has been changed from the Anglo (and archaic) sounding "Pip" to the more American and allusive Finn; and the escaped convict aided by the young Pip has become a death row fugitive convicted in a mob killing. This isn't a matter of grafting the bones of a classic onto a contemporary setting (` la the cheesy opportunism of "West Side Story"), but of rethinking what it means to set "Great Expectations" a continent and almost 200 years away. There's no greater measure of Cuarsn and Glazer's ardent fidelity to their source then the way they plunge into the gothic strangeness of Dickens' novel.

All great novels are strange in their own way. That has less to do with the different customs of another time and place than with the quicksilver mysteriousness of great books, the way they resist being summed up by their theme. "Great Expectations" is a story about how pride separates a young man from the people who love him best, and from his own best instincts. Pip, who rejects the honest and simple man who raises him, and then the even less lofty man who turns out to be his benefactor, calls up every conflict we've ever felt between yearning for the larger world and wishing to remain loyal to the smaller one we came from. That's the primal pull of Dickens. And yet much of the novel bursts the bounds of that subject: Pip's terrifying graveyard encounter with the escaped convict Magwitch; the tormenting muse Estella; his sojourns to the decaying mansion of Miss Havisham, the dowager who locks herself in a rotting private world where time stopped at the precise moment she was jilted on her wedding day.

Those vivid and inexplicable scenes have everything to do with what Orwell called Dickens' extreme sensitivity to the "visualizing tendency" of childhood. We experience a Dickens novel through the skin of the protagonist. And because Finn is an artist, Cuarsn has a built-in means of translating Dickens' "visualizing tendency" from words into images. Working with two brilliant collaborators, production designer Tony Burrough and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Cuarsn has made the movie's emotions inseparable from its visuals. This isn't just one of the most stunning-looking pictures in recent memory; because we see the world as Finn does, nearly every shot advances the story both dramatically and emotionally.

"Great Expectations" exudes an air of voluptuous decay. The mansion of Ms. Dinsmoor (the Miss Havisham figure, played by Anne Bancroft, excessively, as if Carol Channing had attempted Blanche DuBois) is a gilded wreck where hanging vines and a carpet of dead leaves decorate the ballroom and gulls wing their way past the remnants of gold-leaf ceilings. In its way, New York feels just as strange. When Finn and Estella meet in Central Park, it's a golden bower, and the nighttime vistas of the Manhattan skyline are so bejeweled they seem to have been willed into being by Finn's dreams. Elsewhere, ancient chambers seem to have come to life and taken over hidden corners of the city, interiors are brushed with the dying ember glow of firelight, the nighttime streets of SoHo have the velvety blackness of a mysterious forest. Cuarsn is an expressionist by temperament, and he achieves some astonishing, unself-conscious effects. One shot begins with Finn standing on the sidewalk looking up at the night sky and then moves up through the clouds to the window of a plane where Estella sits as she flies away from him.