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Mike Newell’s Great Expectations closes BFI London film festival
Thursday 1st November 2012 | Angie
This year’s 56th BFI film festival came to a triumphant close with the premiere of Mike Newell’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. This being a major British classic, it’s no stranger to reworks on both the big and small screen but this failed to put a dampener on the anticipation generated for the Four Weddings and Harry Potter director’s recent offering. Granted there were obstacles to be worked around and minefields to be avoided in the form the main issues that arise when putting your stamp on a piece of literary legend that many before you have already revised. Mainly, how close would Newell and screenwriter David Nicholls (Starter for Ten, One Day) stick to the novel and, upon straying in directions of their own creative license, how welcome would the changes be?
In the end, the result is pretty predictable – there’s no radical rehaul and lovers of David Lean’s 1946 version won’t be denying it’s status anytime soon, but it does stand out among its predecessors through the evidence of Newell and Nicholls’ personal touch and the way in which the (brilliantly cast) actors choose to play their characters. Speaking on the day of the premiere on 21st October at Empire Cinema in Leicester Square, the director told of how he ‘plundered’ previous versions in the lead up to preparing his own and how attempting to balance previous adaptations with this project was somewhat of a danger. ‘[You can] get lost in other people’s versions and have to hang on to what you thought you were doing… I had to keep wiping my mind clean’.
The novel’s proclaimed enduring appeal across generations carries it through as it seems to be the kind of artistic work that appeals to people again and again psychologically and emotionally. Jeremy Irvine and Holliday Grainger pair up as troubled would-be lovers Pip and Estella. Irvine is motivated to play a ‘stronger pip’ and hit home on his ‘dark driving ambition’ to become a gentleman, subtly encapsulating the flawed edge to his otherwise gentle character. Grainger plays almost in reverse, a cold creature reared to ruin men by her adopted mother Havisham who experiences moments of warm bursts as she struggles and fails to deny her instinctive nature.
Newell heads up the Harry Potter reunion, with the involvement of Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch, Helena Bonham Carter as the twisted Miss Havisham, Robbie Coltrane as the solicitor Jaggers and Jessie Cave as Pip’s girl-next-door Biddy. In Jagger’s we find a blunt, moral-escape artist, ridding himself of blame for any part played in unfolding tragedies due to only ever doing as instructed. Fiennes’ Magwitch emanates the brute nature of a convict and victim of miscarriage of justice, mildly softened by his adoration of Pip, and Bonham Carter delivering the only performance that was expected of her - a woman poisoned by betrayal to the point that she is literally sick with hatred and revenge.
The Dickensian expertise and passion possessed by Nicholls is obvious. He describes Great Expectations as Dickens’ ‘masterpiece, his most perfect book’. Frankly, the man could write whole dissertations on the beloved British writer and it is because of this understanding, the fact that he ‘approached it with a certain amount of reverence’, that his efforts succeed. A focus is kept on the emotional charge which is both subtle and intense. If anything is to catch the hearts of the audience it is the psychology, the drama and the fast pace of it all, pieced together in a series of stunning cinematic shots tinted by romantic hues or dark shadow as necessary. ‘Eisenstein said that Dickens invented film...the camerawork is almost on the page’. And now, once again, beautifully transferred to the silver screen.
Angie Moneke
@angiejudeLDN
