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United Kingdom 2012
Directed by
Mike Newell
128 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2 stars

Great Expectations (2012)

Mike Newell is an experienced director with some good films to his name (my favourite is Dance With A Stranger, 1985) and certainly from this perspective his adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel is a disappointment. But more than that, it is hard to believe that this BBC-produced film had any director at all and was not made by its production team, in particular production designer, Jim Clay, and cinematographer, John Mathieson, simply following the dictates of its shooting script.  The result is a busy, over-stuffed affair wanting any dramatic rigour, pulled  down by unremittingly sentimentality and filmic cliché after cliché, not least being Richard Hartley’s score. Compared to David Lean's 1946 black and white adaptation, it is a monumental dud.

Casting is a major problem, most notably in the case of Helena Bonham-Carter who appears to have come straight off the set of one of her husband Tim Burton’s Gothic fantasies whilst as the adult Pip Jeremy Irvine is a bland presence and Holliday Grainger unconvincing as his heart-breaking object of desire, Estella . If the rest of the cast including Robbie Coltrane as Jaggers, Ewen Bremner as Wemmick provide a bit of fun as stock charcters only Ralph Fiennes stands out as Magwitch  and even this is more so in the latter part of the film than his initial appearance as a ball of dirt

Given the length of Dickens’s novel you’d think that writer David Nicholls would have cut out the descriptive aspects to concentrate on the characters but the reverse appears to have happened with most of the relationships treated schematically and a lot of trouble having been taken to present Dickensian England in all its grotesqueness. The best parts of the film, and there are few enough of them, is when its deals with Pip’s conflicted relationship with his good-hearted uncle, Joe (Jason Flemyng), and the fatalistic Magwitch.

Dickens and sentimentality are hardly strangers but that is no reason to wallow in it with Disney-like heavy-handedness as for some inexplicable reason, this film does.

 

 

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