Great Expectations (1999)
A young boy called Pip stumbles upon a hunted criminal who threatens him and demands food. A few years later, Pip finds that he has a benefactor. Imagining that Miss Havisham, a rich lady whose adopted daughter Estella he loves, is the benefactor, Pip believes in a grand plan at the end of which he will be married to Estella. However, when the criminal from his childhood turns up one stormy night and reveals that he, Magwitch, is his benefactor, Pip finds his dreams crumbling. Although initially repulsed by his benefactor, Pip gradually becomes loyal to him and stays with him until his death.
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Good movie but grossly overrated
Brilliant and touching
There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.
The film may be flawed, but its message is not.
This is better than the Michael York 'Great Expectations' which is not worth your time. But some addled producer must have gotten it in his head that Dickens deserved the weightiness of Shakespeare. It doesn't. Almost all Dickens is low, rollicking and shambling, with fuzzy edges. His books don't have these overly tasteful aspirations. Here, a very good Dickens novel is given a straight, costume-drama, Masterpiece Theater production. And it attempts some regional verisimilitude that doesn't end up adding much. It seems designed to appeal to female viewers. Dickens characters are recluses, unbalanced eccentrics and weirdos, but here they've all been leveled out. Characters, settings, emotions, none of it ends up being as vivid as the David Lean version which has been more lovingly shaped. Every emotion in this is oh-so-serious with characters brooding over things that can't be spoken. It's like they all worked too hard on figuring out the "inner truth" and "motivation" of their characters. PFFFFT! To what end? It kills the story. They're so uptight they might as well be Swedish.The story is better and more thoughtful when it's ambiguous and without a villain (See Lean). Miss Havisham is a bit of absurdity who should be treated almost as a caricature, though she certainly delivers some bombshells. It doesn't suit the story for her be played realistically like here. Orlick shows up in this version, but his value was never very important to the Pip narrative, except to include Dicken's usual villain. This Jaggers just cannot compare with Francis Sullivan's haughty power-brokering from '46. But the fatal blow is Ioan Gruffudd. At no point can a viewer decipher what his impenetrable, stone-faced Pip feels about anything. It's impossible to see him as anything other than a prop that is acted upon. The pacing is beyond lugubrious. Not an ounce of humor remains.
This is quite a good version, but be prepared for some oddities. The main one that Pip is made less nice than usual. His friendship with Joe is made to seem particularly one-sided, and he is extra reluctant to help Magwitch on the latter's return. Both young and older Pip are well played -- Gabriel Thomson deserves particular praise -- but we never feel that we really know the character. This is perhaps the main defect of this version. The voice-over in the old David Lean version was helpful there.I personally don't like Charlotte Rampling as Miss Havisham. The role should not have been glamourised. Dickens does not do glamour. Estella is good however. Compare this performance with the oversweet Estella of the David Lean film.By the way, this version has an excellent Herbert Pocket. The goody-goody characters in Dickens are not easy to play without sugary sentimentality, but Daniel Evans' Herbert really lives.
Whilst it has not stuck to the text word for word, it has not veered greatly from it. The film covers everything that needs to be covered on the whole, and where it has altered things, I think it has done so for the better. The film still paints and amazing picture of this excellent piece of literary work!The casting was simply spectacular, the idea of sexing up Miss Havesham with the delectable Charlotte Rampling was perhaps the most unique and welcomed aspect of this production, which does anything but suffer from it. Waddell, Hill, Gruffudd, and Evans all give stellar performances and carry the film. The score is extremely haunting and so spectacular that I went out and bought the CD (which we were very lucky the BBC released). How Peter Salem has not been snapped up by Hollywood yet I don't know!The score on top of the direction and production design make this a mouth watering feature that I'd recommend to anyone! The film got me through A-Level English.
`Great Expectations' is the best of Charles Dickens's novels. Maybe it's the best novel that there is. It's certainly a novel where every incident is important - so there is no excuse for a TV version being a miserable three hours long. If they HAD to truncate it, though, then there's no help for it: some valuable scenes must be removed. What they've done instead is to sort of leave everything in, but skate over it all at high speed. It's as if they've simply left out every other sentence. The opening encounter with Magwitch in the churchyard is conveyed without being shown at all. We get a few seconds of terror, then a cut to later that evening, and then we're shown a bit more of the crucial scene in flashback - only just enough to understand what is going on, if that. (Don't even get me STARTED on the ludicrous editing, or the self-consciously arty camera angles.) Some scenes have been re-written. The result is usually awful.Is this just the complaint of someone who has read the book, and finds the filmed version to be different? No: rather the reverse. If you haven't read the book you'll have a much harder time than I did even making sense of things; and you won't, as I did, have any particular reason to care about the characters.For instance: the central character is Pip. Anyone who has read the book knows how close Dickens brings us to him. Not once in this version are we, so to speak, introduced to Pip. No scene lasts long enough - he does not confide in any other character long enough - for us to get a sense of his motivations or a reason to continue to sympathise with him after he does something shameful. What's more, the mature Pip is an utter disaster. The re-writing of key encounters with Miss Havisham, Orlick, and Estella (that's right - all three) makes Pip out to be more thoughtless, more cowardly, more vindictive and less intelligent than Dickens makes him out to be. (Note that Dickens doesn't make him out to be vindictive at all.) If we care what happens to him at all it's only because we have even less reason to care what happens to anyone else.I've only scratched the surface - it's bad all the way through. I will, though, allow that many of the actors give excellent performances under trying circumstances. (I can't warm at all to Ioan Gruffudd as the mature Pip, but that was probably the script.) That's about it. I can't even recommend this as the best TV version going, since the Disney series of 1989 (a decent five hours long) is all that one could wish for. With that version in existence this one was just a waste of everyone's time. Don't make it a waste of yours.