January 29–February 5, 1998

movies

Great Expectations

Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
A Twentieth Century Fox Release

recommended

"Sexy" and "Dickens" aren't words that ordinarily occupy the same sentence, let alone the same movie review, but then very little of Great Expectations is as you'd expect it to be. Director Alfonso Cuarón, who revised A Little Princess three years ago, has turned Dickens' novel into a lush, hallucinatory love story, full of glistening images and heady sensuality. With its slick style and modern setting, Great Expectations seems at first like a bad idea on the scale of the most recent Romeo and Juliet, where flashy Aussie Baz Luhrman turned Shakespeare into an excuse for Leonardo DiCaprio to shout at rain machines. But Cuarón's take on Dickens is more thoughtful, bolder and more cohesive than Luhrman's half-baked effort. While it won't please anyone looking for a faithful simulation of Dickens, Great Expectations more than succeeds on its own merits.

Mitch Glaser's script recasts Pip as Finnegan Bell, known mostly as Finn, a sandy-haired budding artist whose trampy sister (Kim Dickens) dumps him on a down-on-his-luck Florida fisherman (Chris Cooper). While his foster father is doing odd jobs at a run-down estate called Paradiso Perduto, Finn encounters the wildly eccentric Nora Dinsmoor (Anne Bancroft), a flamboyant but heartless woman who uses Finn to teach her young daughter Estella how to seduce men without falling in love with them. With her heavy makeup and crazy eyes, Bancroft's Dinsmoor looks like something out of Brazil, a maniacal voyeur who cackles with glee as she watches Finn and Estella dance.

Although she's a spoiled snob, Finn falls in love with Estella anyway, but she's off to school in Switzerland before he can do anything about it, and it isn't until Finn's all grown up into Ethan Hawke and she into Gwyneth Paltrow that the two are reunited. With the help of a mysterious benefactor, Finn travels to New York and mounts a successful gallery show, drawing Estella's eye in the process. But she's already engaged to the aptly named Walter Plane (Hank Azaria), a dully secure type who offers her stability without the threat of love. Her mother's pupil, Estella has learned not to feel too deeply, to look at men as conquests instead of lovers.

A true sensualist, Cuarón makes heroes of those who live out their inner passions, and fills his movie with rich images waiting to be inhaled. (The cinematography is by Like Water for Chocolate's Emmanuel Lubezki.) The playfully explicit sexuality makes a strong impression; without resorting to the usual thrusting and moaning, the film makes clear the intensely sexual nature of Finn and Estella's relationship. Despite the focus on sexual forthrightness, though, there's hardly any nudity in Great Expectations (although Gwyneth Paltrow is saved only by a few carefully chosen camera angles). In fact, the film's most sweetly erotic moment occurs when the two are children: Finn (played here by young Jeremy Kissner) bends to sip from a fountain, and Estella (Rachel Beaudene) touches her extended tongue to his through the water. Like few American directors, Cuarón understands that creating a sensual moment has more to do with our emotional connection to the scene than with the amount of flesh on display.

Perhaps the only major problem with Great Expectations is its title: anyone going to the movie looking for Dickens is bound to be disappointed, and the title is sure to scare away audiences who are understandably wary of literary rip-offs. Cuarón's adaptation once again proves that the only way to make a good movie out of literature is to ignore the source, but of course that begs the question: Why bother with the source at all?

—Sam Adams