Great Expectations

Fine acting and well paced. All the family enjoyed this together. Ray Winstone stole the show for us. Beautifully shot.

A new adaptation of 'Great Expectations' seems to be obligatory every decade or so. One of the best was the 1999 version with Ioan Gruffudd playing the adult Pip - a beautiful, poised production that made some cuts and alterations but basically kept faith with Dickens's novel. The Hollywood one with Gwyneth Paltrow was rather daft, but got away with it by setting it in contemporary America. This one seems to have almost everything: a terrific cast (though the pretty boy Booth playing Pip is only ok), perfect locations and costumes, plenty of big-budget period atmosphere... and a complete clunker of script. The dialogue is so bad (so obviously 21st century, basically) that it's like being repeatedly poked in the ear. 'Guess you messed things up', says Magwitch - played with effortless menace by Ray Winstone - in a late scene that's meant to be filled with pathos, not Eastenders argot (ow! poke, prod). 'Expedite this quickly', Miss Havisham urges Jaggers pointlessly (more painful prodding). As the episodes plod along - can there really be only three? it feels like five - the plot gets more and more wildly divergent from that of 'Great Expectations', and almost always to its detriment. No film adaption can replicate the novel - none should, really - but any that's set in the period of the novel could at least have some confidence in Dickens's own dialogue. It is, after all, what he's best at. But none of these characters has a unique voice, only (sometimes) a funny regional accent. All the comedy is evacuated from characters like Joe and Pumblechook, and it all ends up horribly poe-faced, earnest and melodramatic. Where Dickens makes his points about class through painful irony and situation comedy, this adaptation bludgeons us with Drummond's clumsy hauteur. The classic slapstick scene with Joe's hat in Pip's lodgings is replaced with a leaden conversation that explains in leaden phrases what Dickens was content to show us through action. The one exception to the general sense of disappointment and wasted effort is Gillian Anderson's Miss Havisham. Never before has she seemed to desperately creepy and neurotic. She keeps picking at scabs on the back of her hand, and her lips are all chapped - but her skin is clear and unlined as befits a still-young woman. Her final scene is a departure from the novel, but a wonderful one. The hardest thing for modern script-writers and film-makers to accept is that Dickens shows Miss Havisham's work on Estella to have been successful. She really does have 'no heart', as she claims. It gives little away to point out that this adaptation, like many others, can't quite accept that. It's only the last in a long line of disappointments doled out by this dreadful adaptation of one of the greatest novels ever written.

I've always been a fan of 'Great Expectations', ever since studying it as part of my English literature exams back in the 1970's. In those days, we would all sit in the lecture room at school and watch the 1946 black and white John Mills / Valerie Hobson version, directed by David Lean, which I have always enjoyed. This made-for TV version is every bit as good and I can definitely recommend it !!!

Although this has been dramatised so many times, I felt this version was one of the best. Quality from start to finish with excellent performances from the whole cast. Well worth a watch.