'Great Expectations':
Tale of Two Stories, This One With a Ms.

The New York Times
January 30, 1998
By JANET MASLIN


When filmmakers today talk about updating the classics, chances
are they have a music video format in mind. That's the spirit of
the new pop overhaul of "Great Expectations," but the director,
Alfonso Cuaron, also has lovelier aspirations. With the same
visual enchantment he brought to "A Little Princess," Cuaron
does turn the famous story into one Charles Dickens would barely
recognize, complete with a renamed Miss Havisham (Anne Bancroft)
campy enough to suggest Baby Jane in Las Vegas. The directorial
approach is so bold and vulgar that it has no business working.
But often it does.

Largely because Cuaron is such a voluptuous visual stylist, this
"Great Expectations" is capable of wonder even when its wilder
ideas misfire. Without resorting to purely random change, the
filmmaker does dust some cobwebs off its radically abridged
version of Dickens. Anyone who minds the loss of the name Pip
(it's now Finn) or the substitution of pelican-filled Gulf Coast
landscapes for English moors can be duly horrified and should
assuredly stay home. But the switches made by this American
version can be adventurous, even apt. And the film makes up in
visual exoticism some of what it loses in character and context.

The bare bones that remain here are the story of Finnegan Bell
(Ethan Hawke plays him as an adult) and the strangely significant
figures he meets in childhood. Robert De Niro, giving the most
successfully Dickensian performance in the movie, plays the
mysterious convict who bullies young Finn into saving his life.
Finn's chance encounter with this man (once Magwitch, now Lustig)
makes no more or less sense than his summons to the overgrown
Gothic palazzo where Nora Dinsmoor (Ms. Bancroft) lives in the
past. Feminist update: this tragically unmarried lady is more
festive than gloomy and no longer wears a tattered wedding dress.
She's painted up and ready to party, and she's now called Ms.

At the Dinsmoor mansion, strikingly filmed at a Sarasota Bay
relic built for the Ringling circus family, Finn becomes
lovestruck at the sight of the beautiful blonde who will haunt
him through the rest of the story. This is Estella, ravishingly
introduced as a child and then seen dancing gracefully into the
grown-up incarnation of Gwyneth Paltrow.

Though the film, being more visual than verbal, is especially
weak in explaining Estella's enigmatic behavior toward Finn, Ms.
Paltrow does turn herself into the elegant object of desire that
the story requires.

Her presence is as coolly striking as her role (in Mitch Glazer's
screenplay) is underwritten. Incidentally, this is one more film
in which the heroine's posing nude for an artist is supposed to
make her more fully defined.

Ms. Paltrow oozes such metropolitan sophistication here that it
even makes sense for the film to follow her from Florida to New
York. This, less convincingly, is supposed to be the trajectory
of Finn's brilliant career in the art world. Thanks to limpid
portraits of the cast members supplied by Francesco Clemente,
Finn becomes the toast of SoHo and re-encounters Estella at her
most bewitching. Hawke seldom registers anything more
interesting than astonishment at Finn's good fortune.

With Chris Cooper, Hank Azaria, Josh Mostel and Kim Dickens
playing supporting figures in Finn's story, the film moves
through a series of spacious, romantically pretty settings that
set the film's fairy-tale mood.

Even a New York subway where Cuaron sets the story's most
melodramatically tragic event manages to gleam here. And the
characters, especially Ms. Bancroft's, become less mannered and
jarring as the film takes shape, moving decoratively toward the
sunnier of two closing sections that Dickens wrote for "Great
Expectations." The author was made to revise his initially
honest, gloomy finale to close this tale more palatably. Even
in his day, when sugarplum storytelling like this must have
been unimaginable, there was a taste for the Hollywood ending.


PRODUCTION NOTES

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Rating: "Great Expectations" is rated R (Under 17 requires
accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes profanity
and one especially nonliterary sequence with Ms. Paltrow posing
in the buff for her centerfold.

Directed by Alfonso Cuaron; written by Mitch Glazer, based on
the novel by Charles Dickens; director of photography, Emmanuel
Lubezki; edited by Steven Weisberg; music by Patrick Doyle;
production designer, Tony Burrough; produced by Art Linson;
released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 115 minutes. This
film is rated R.

Cast: Ethan Hawke (Finnegan Bell), Gwyneth Paltrow (Estella),
Hank Azaria (Walter Plane), Chris Cooper (Joe), Anne Bancroft
(Nora Dinsmoor), Robert De Niro (Prisoner/Lustig), Kim Dickens
(Maggie) and Josh Mostel (Jerry Ragno).