General Interest Review 00011

Great Expectations (film)

Great Expectations, a film based on the Charles Dickens novel of the same title, was released in 1998. It benefits from glorious acting by Anne Bancroft playing the Miss Havisham character, and wonderful cinematography under the direction of Alfonso Cuaron. Ethan Hawke and Gwynteth Paltrow also star, with both turning in acceptable but not dazzling performances.

The film is basically an "update" of the novel, grafting the basic story -- about a boy who has an encounter with a convict, meets an old, embittered rich woman and her daughter, receives riches from an anonymous benefactor, and becomes unknowingly entangled with all of them -- into modern day America as opposed to 19th century England. It is an understatement that much has changed in the years since Dickens wrote the novel. The world has become faster, and more spread out, we are constantly told. There is more social mobility and opportunity. Oddly, though, the update of the movie shrinks the world presented in the book to five or six people and a lot of flat characters hovering around them.

The movie strikes gold turning the Pip character into an artist. There is no better a place to showcase the quick mobility and tumultuous turn of fortune than through a high stakes world like art. But the film allows itself to slip into a pastiche about the treacherously superficial art world during these scenes. To be sure, this has a Dickensian ring of social commentary, but missing are the complex web of relationships that moves the Pip character toward his final revelation. In the book, Jaggers -- who handles Pip's affairs via his anonymous benefactor -- is a much more consequential character than the lawyer encountered in the movie. Herbert, Pip's friend in London who helps him through the years of longing for Estella and development from pauper to gentleman, is also absent.

The subplot involving the convict, Magwitch, who is eventually revealed to be Pip's benefactor is also glossed over. In the book, Pip struggles with his embarrassment of Magwitch, and comes to see the good in him later -- when it is too late. This is crucial to the framework of the story, which is based around the ideas, and, yes, expectations, that are cast by social station. In the movie, we get a rather tidy death of Fin's benefactor by mob men. It never turns out that there is any connection between the convict and Miss Havisham and Estella, giving a vacant feeling to their story entirely. It makes the ending feel a bit like an afternoon thunderstorm on a hot summer day. It was a bit violent there for a moment, but now it's all over and, hey! the weather's even a little nicer now. Since Fin never has time to consider his relationship to his benefactor, he doesn't have to think about the unexpected turns of his life, and how they indicate that expectations mean virtually nothing compared to qualities like honor and loyalty.

The movie people probably saw these changes as tweaks. Necessary ruffles in the plot in order to make the whole thing a bit more commercially acceptable. After all, people don't want to watch anything where they have to use their brain. Those movies are such downers. But without the depth of the plot, it's impossible to get the whole picture. In the end, we're left with the two would-be lovers looking on each other as equals. They think nothing of what has happened to them in the past, letting it fall away like a dream. This is a far cry from the book, where Pip and Estella are only able to get together after their experience heals them of their worry over expectation.

The two works are obviously different, but one was popular with a mass audience in the 19th century, and one was marketed to a mass audience at the end of the 20th century. As expectations for time periods go, the film would likely have been a deeper work. Its audience was probably more educated, and certainly more used to grasping the kind of ideas that the novel put forth. But like all expectations, it appears they were a bit too high to live up to.