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How entertaining? ★★☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 20 November 2012
This article is a review of GREAT EXPECTATIONS. |
“I don’t believe it. How can there be beauty with no heart?” Pip to Estella
I’ve fought the thought for a very long time. Wanting to believe otherwise. Capitulation of desire against sense? You decide. Here it is… director Mike Newell is a hack. Ever since FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL launched him onto the international cinema scene, he has delivered bland movie experience after bland experience. He has no verve or panache, and the resultant work lacks intellectual rigour. Newell is handed prestige adaptations like LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA and completely fumbles it; or funky little pics like DONNIE BRASCO and PUSHING TIN and they are ground out without the requisite brio. PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME and HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE are perfunctory blockbusters – not building on the source. GREAT EXPECTATIONS has all those flaws rolled into one, no stunt casting can salvage.
I’ve fought the thought for a very long time. Wanting to believe otherwise. Capitulation of desire against sense? You decide. Here it is… director Mike Newell is a hack. Ever since FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL launched him onto the international cinema scene, he has delivered bland movie experience after bland experience. He has no verve or panache, and the resultant work lacks intellectual rigour. Newell is handed prestige adaptations like LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA and completely fumbles it; or funky little pics like DONNIE BRASCO and PUSHING TIN and they are ground out without the requisite brio. PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME and HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE are perfunctory blockbusters – not building on the source. GREAT EXPECTATIONS has all those flaws rolled into one, no stunt casting can salvage.
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The first question anyone contemplating making, let alone seeing, should contemplate: Do we need another effing straight Dickens adaptation? Has anyone really improved on David Leans’ 1940s duo of EXPECTATIONS and OLIVER TWIST? At least Roman Polanski added fear and violence to soften the sentimentality of the latter. There’s no doubt the author of so many seminal novels is worthy of celebration. His humanistic and empathetic works should be read. But, why create a new version unless it is a new vision? For all the casting problems of the second half, at least Andrea Arnold’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS gave us an interesting spin on the classic. One thing Dickens espouses is courage, and that is what too many transitions to a visual media lack. Compare and contrast CORIOLANUS – lumpen yes, though setting Shakespeare in a modern Eastern European war deserves props.
You must know the story of EXPECTATIONS by now? If not, stop where you are, download onto your iPad/Kindle/Surface/Nexus/Xperia etc., or go to a library, and have a read.
Ok, you’re back after a night by an open fire digesting the Brit novel. We have Jeremy Irvine as Pip. Maybe he thought how can I have even less presence, and be more leaden, than I was in WAR HORSE? Then there’s Holliday Grainger’s Estella – attractive yes, but the slayer of men’s hearts? The two are used by the filmmakers to make a laughable melodrama in the TWILIGHT mould. Don’t get me started on two acting titans who should’ve known better: Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter. They ham it up like they’ve been on a pork diet. And that’s how the acting is divided: over-the-top or lost.
Take out what the novel has to say, and the movie gives us nothing extra. Please sir, can I have something inventive?
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