WHAT THE DICKENS?

Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke have a tortured date with destiny
in an updated Great Expectations.


Review by Owen Gleiberman

In a grandly rotting Palm Beach mansion, one covered with ancient
mossy vines (not just on the outside--on the inside), a young man
and a young woman clasp hands, stare at each other with deep
meaning, and dance. As they step and glide through the ghostly
decrepit room, flirtation is transformed into desire, and desire
into dreams. This, you see, is no ordinary pas de deux, no
accidental dance. For it is the destiny of this particular young
couple to...what? To fall in love? Not quite. To part ways and
wish they had fallen in love? Not exactly. Let's just say that
it's their destiny to be...destined.

The young man, an artist raised in a fishing village along
Florida's Gulf Coast, had a boyhood encounter with fate in the
form of an escaped prisoner (Robert De Niro) to whom he was
kinder than he needed to be. Now it's the 1980s, and he is about
to be plucked from obscurity and given a chance to showcase his
lyrical, heart's-eye drawings at a famous Manhattan gallery. The
young woman, too, is destined to journey to New York City. Only
there, you see, can she become truly fabulous, wearing dazzling
clothes, meeting rich men, and continuing her ambiguous dance of
desire with the young artiste. Love, if not exactly for sale, now
comes at quite a price.

Great Expectations (Twentieth Century Fox) is a fractured folly
of extravagant art gestures, a Hollywood-cocktail-party version
of literary updating. In virtually every scene, the movie
declares its lofty intentions. It wants to be about the
impossibility of love, about the siren song of visual beauty,
about the call of ambition and, of course, destiny. What it
isn't about is characters who appear to be occupying a planet
remotely like to the one you and I are stuck on. Directed by
Alfonso Cuaron (A
Little Princess), from a very loose adaptation of the Charles
Dickens novel (the screenplay is by Mitch Glazer, who also
modernized Dickens in the script he cowrote for Scrooged),
Great Expectations, in the wake of William Shakespeare's Romeo
& Juliet, is proof that if you try repackaging the classics for
the youth market in an era of MTV dislocation, what you get, in
essence, is postmodern Cliffs Notes with an alt-rock soundtrack.

In addition to Finn (Ethan Hawke) and Estella (Gwyneth Paltrow),
the dancing duo who meet in childhood, that Florida mansion is
occupied by a third--and much scarier--party, Estella's aging
aunt, played by Anne Bancroft in a performance destined to touch
the hearts of drag queens everywhere. Guzzling martinis, singing
endless, rueful choruses of "Besame Mucho," Bancroft's Ms.
Dinsmoor swoons and poses as if she were the spirit of unrequited
love, but mostly she just seems nuts--a gargoyle vamp wearing
too much wrinkle-enhancing makeup. With a character like this as
its fairy godmother, it's no wonder that Great Expectations
floats into the ozone.

Romeo & Juliet, raucous and slipshod as it was, had a couple of
glamorous young stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes,
attached to the most famous love tragedy of the Western world.
Great Expectations hardly lacks for star power, but it scrambles
for a more desperate commercial strategy. It offers an abstract
"literary" pedigree plus nudity plus a disaffected push-pull
romance set in the burgeoning '80s art world. Even if the audience
that turned out for Romeo & Juliet is seduced into going to this
one, they may not know what to make of a love story that consists
of Gwyneth Paltrow gazing moonily at Ethan Hawke, then giving him
the cold shoulder, then stripping off her clothes to pose for him,
then giving him the cold shoulder again, then...you get the idea.

That posing scene is the movie's centerpiece. It's supposed to be
trendy and alluringly hot/cool, but the song it's cut to, Pulp's
"Like a Friend," sounds very '96 to me, and Paltrow's I'm-just-a-
girl tease dance is like something out of a designer- perfume
commercial. Curling her thin, aristocratic lips with voluptuous
playfulness, Paltrow has such natural ebullience that even when
she portrays a cold, neurotic (and nonsensical) character like
this one, she can still engage you. Hawke , on the other hand,
would do well to avoid getting cast as any more tormented
bohemian saints. He's a gifted actor, but too much romantic
suffering doesn't look good on him; he just seems a pretty boy
pining for street cred. Great Expectations could actually have
used a bit of street cred. It's one of those bogus Manhattan
morality plays in which an art opening has to be filled with
fey snobs flaring their nostrils in disgust, while Finn's Joe
Sixpack uncle (Chris Cooper) talks too loudly and knocks over a
tray of champagne glasses. Forget love. This movie couldn't pass
muster as a lesson in manners.

Grade:  D+