The dense Dickens novel "Great Expectations" has been translated for the MTV generation in director Alfonso Cuaron's remake. Gwyneth
Paltrow's Estella, the icy object of desire, embodies the film: both are slender, stunning, lacking heart and strictly surface eye-candy. The entire plot is told in the commercials, so I'll tell what
happens. This is a striking looking film with very well thought out production design
and impressive consistency in the fairy-tale quality of its look. It's unfortunate that Ethan Hawke's unremarkable narration is the first thing we hear as the film opens to lovely shots of Florida's Gulf coast. His thin voice with its blurry diction is so ordinary against the lush beauty of the images, making for a bad fit. The entire film is like this: excellent visuals supporting lame dialogue and wispy Gen-X posturing posing as acting. Oh well, it's entertainment, nothing more.
Finn discovers the convict Lustig in a forceful sequence as
Robert DeNiro roars onto the screen and demands help from the young
Finn (Hawke). Finn does help, he thinks he's seen the end of Lustig, and we have to ruin a potentially thought-provoking sequence with some more
flat babble from Mr. Hawke. The script has some very clumsy transitions but this probably couldn't be helped, considering the script is little more than Cliff Notes. Finn and Joe, his sister's boyfriend (his
sister? this is some serious age discrepancy here) go to Ms Dinsmoore's rotting mansion and there Finn meets Estella, in a whirling and nicely done introduction. The eccentric Ms. Dinsmoor (played by Anne Bancroft
with far more gusto than a batty, bitter spinster should possess) buys Finn's services as a playmate for Estella and discovers his artistic talent. Fast forward to the grown pair and
Estella's
abrupt departure, but not before we have a very silly, um, groping scene complete with a gratuitous crotch shot. I mean, a shot up her skirt. Thank goodness Estella keeps her drawers on. Well, this kind of senseless flesh-flash is necessary to keep interest, because Estella is a snobby tease and that gets old real fast.
Years later, a mysterious lawyer gives Finn the chance to go to New York and have his own show. Guess who is in New York? Guess who goes? Guess who he meets? Estella is seriously tweaked
and insists on posing nude for Finn, in a very long sequence that looks like an ad for either underwear or anorexia. Bones a-jutting, Gwyneth does a very good job of looking emotionally dead and expensively
stylish. She's hard put to show any humanity behind Estella's frozen haughtiness, but she does very well in the end of the movie. Too bad her one scene where Estella's guard drops is lifeless. Ethan
Hawke has to spend most of the movie looking wide-eyed and amazed. He's also got a tough job, because Finn is a pawn of others. He comes to life when Finn decides to take some decisive action, especially
when he rattles off the sentimental life story he's concocted for the media splurge he wants. Finn's a success and finds out later that night who his real benefactor is, and it's not the obvious suspect. The
scene when he finds out the truth is very nicely done, and provides the only real Wow! in the picture. Hawke's scenes with DeNiro add a moral weight to the film, making Finn's story meaningful.
Unfortunately, this late revelation also serves to highlight the shallowness of the Estella-Finn story.
The two leads are not half as interesting as the supporting players. Nell Campbell (Little Nell from
'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' and more recently, owner of the NY nightclub bearing her name) is very good, snippy and crisp as the gallery owner. That's Stephen Spinella from 'Angels in America' as a persistent
pest. Chris Cooper (the sheriff from 'Lone Star') delivers another natural, dignified performance as Joe, the man who raises Finn. DeNiro delivers a fine character as Lustig, the convict who changes
Finn's life. His famed intensity is used to very good effect when Lustig first appears (very nice touch with the TV footage). Later on, he's humorous, very funny, and finally the most human character in the
movie, a man who accepts his fate because he knows he paid back a kindness. I wish the movie had concentrated more on Lustig, with his bad deeds and high morals, and made the two matching Gen X lovely leads as
supporting characters.
"Great Expectations" is very uneven. Some things in this film are superb: production design, the use of the color green, the look of rich New York, Lustig trying to evade his
clumsy yet lethal buddies (a scene both funny and menacing, very hard to pull off but done nicely), Chris Cooper's realization that he no longer fits into Finn's life, the zoom up from Finn's gaze to Estella sitting in
a plane. And some things are very bad: most of the dialogue, vast and disorienting jumps in time (this is told as memory and not as a story, but still ---!), Finn creates all that art in 10 weeks?
The script makes tremendous leaps in time without allowing any time for character development, which limits the endeavor glossy entertainment bonbon. You can guess the end, and it's no surprise,
except that Estella and Finn haven't aged a bit in 20 some-odd years. Well, it is the movies.
Director Cuaron (who did 'Like Water for Chocolate')
knows how to make a scene look slightly warped and surrealistic. He pulls this off marvelously in the first scenes of Ms. Havisham's decrepit mansion and the young Finn (Ethan Hawke) and Estella (Gwyneth Paltrow) dancing in a vast, leaf-littered ballroom shaded by overgrown vegetation. Cuaron uses the FL and NYC locales very effectively. The scenes with the young Finn bring the natural world closer and closer, and show how Finn is connected to his environment. NYC has a sparkling glow and you can almost feel the pulse of power and money in the city. He's also very good at handling visual transitions, nice use of light, and knows how to frame a shot for best impact, especially when showing characters outside.
Photography is stunning. Good use of music (soundtrack
reads like a definition of modern pop: Tori Amos, Pulp, Duncan Sheik, The Verve Pipe, Reef) and nice costume work. I loved Lustig's quasi-businessman look, the young Estella's ethereal dresses and Ms
Havisham's insane outfits and wigs.
Dicken's perceptive dissection of English class snobbery and hypocrisy loses a lot of oomph when the setting is modern-day America. |
