Mike Newell (2012)
My father loved Dickens. I was never sure how many of the novels he’d read; I am sure it was plenty more than I’ve managed. Great Expectations is perhaps the only Dickens that I’ve reread. I remember that when I enthused about it my father disagreed. That was what tended to happen when I enthused about anything but in this case I can remember what he said to explain his lukewarmness: ‘Pip’s a creep’. A dramatisation of the novel is likely to be seriously weakened if the actor playing Philip Pirrip suggests nothing more than a creep. That certainly wasn’t the case in the 1999 BBC mini-series: Ioan Gruffudd, with his complicated charm and emotional alertness, was the best Pip I’ve seen. In this latest cinema version of Great Expectations, the boy Pip is played by Toby Irvine, in his first movie. He grows into Toby’s brother Jeremy, already familiar from War Horse and who’ll be seen next as the young Eric Lomax (he ages into Colin Firth) in The Railway Man. It’s the younger brother who’s the more expressive. Toby Irvine is good at suggesting feelings in Pip that he wants to conceal (shame, when Estella insults him on his early visits to Satis House) or of which he’s at first not fully conscious (dissatisfaction with life with Joe Gargery). When Jeremy Irvine first appears, Pip is hard at work at the forge. The sound of the hammer blows gets across the relentless, erosive labour that seems to be Pip’s lot in life. But Irvine’s appearance immediately strikes a false note. He’s lit so that the glow of the furnace emphasises his film-star good looks. Even if you’d never read the novel, the news of Pip’s sudden prospects in a world beyond the smithy would come as no surprise. Jeremy Irvine was likeable in War Horse but he’s not able – or not yet able (he’s twenty-two) – to fuse a character’s conflicting feelings satisfyingly. He switches between shocked innocence and snobbishness without making any connection between them. In the middle ground of Pip’s personality, he emotes conscientiously but imprecisely. Irvine goes an unfortunately long way towards vindicating my father’s summary of Pip.
To be fair to Jeremy Irvine, the direction and screenplay don’t help him. The challenge of compressing the novel into 128 minutes shouldn’t be underestimated but Mike Newell’s beat-the-clock approach gives the impression he had little more than two hours of shooting time. Swift cutting is one thing (the BBC’s 2005 Bleak House, though excellent and innovative, hasn’t been a wholly good influence on screen Dickens) but the conversations often seem rushed and the actors’ timing off. This is a particular problem with the less experienced players, especially the child Estella (Helena Barlow), who doesn’t feel her lines. One of the regrettable omissions from David (One Day) Nicholls’s script is Dolge Orlick and what happens to the termagant Mrs Joe, for which Orlick may be responsible[1]. This is a visually dark-toned Great Expectations but I missed the metaphorical darkness of Orlick’s character. Sally Hawkins is a refreshingly pretty Mrs Joe but her vividly apoplectic quality is largely wasted as we never see the character reduced to silence. (Her death is simply reported.) And though Ewen Bremner is good as Wemmick, retaining the Aged Parent (Frank Dunne) is pointless if you’re going to reduce the role to a few seconds of the Wemmicks’ domestic routine. (Once Jeremy Irvine nods his head vigorously at Aged P and the cannon’s been fired, Newell considers the job done.) What’s most frustrating is that precious screen time is wasted on other things. In a lame effort to make the material ‘filmic’, Newell and Nicholls provide uninspired reconstructions of Miss Havisham’s wedding morning, Magwitch and Compeyson in the dock together, etc. These sequences are superfluous anyway when the characters still explain to each other and to us what happened before the story began. In what appears a similarly clumsy attempt to keep Dickens socially ‘relevant’, several minutes are spent staging gatherings of ‘The Finches of the Grove’ with their Bullingdon Club associations.
Mike Newell comes up with some striking images – the horribly burned face of the dying Miss Havisham, the massive ship hulk bearing down on Pip and Magwitch at the climax of the failed attempt to get the latter out of England. Newell also deserves credit for some unpredictable casting: it’s unfortunate that his lack of patience or imagination or both means this doesn’t pay dividends. I liked Ralph Fiennes’s Magwitch in the opening scenes; he makes you realise that it’s Magwitch’s desperation that makes him more frightening. As the film goes on, however, Fiennes’ portrait becomes more conventional – in contrast, Robbie Coltrane’s Jaggers is increasingly persuasive. Helena Bonham Carter’s relative youth enables her to show that trauma rather than time has withered Miss Havisham. Bonham Carter is erratic, though: the depth of her loathing of life and herself registers strongly when she snaps back at Pip, ‘Who am I, for God’s sake, that I should be kind?!’ but she’s also mannered in a self-conscious way. A larger problem is that this casting turns out, in visual terms anyway, to be less original than it sounded: Helena Bonham Carter has looked so extraordinary in Tim Burton films in recent years that her make-up and costume here don’t have a lot of impact. Holliday Grainger is an odd Estella. She doesn’t have much variety but her face and bearing make Estella seem trapped and old beyond her years, which feels right. David Walliams, needless to say, delivers a showy cartoon Pumblechook; he’s instantly tedious. There are two excellent supporting performances, though. Jason Flemyng plays Joe Gargery with a fine, affecting sensitivity – his Joe is a reminder that you don’t need brains to get your feelings hurt. Alec Guinness’s achievement in making Herbert Pocket not merely tolerable but just about delightful is perhaps the very best thing in David Lean’s Great Expectations. Olly Alexander isn’t in that class but he’s genuinely and easily eccentric in the role (and Charlie Callaghan as the child Herbert also does well).
19 December 2012
[1] I hadn’t realised, until I watched the 1946 film again the following day, how closely Newell and Nicholls follow the David Lean version – not only in what their adaptation retains of and omits from the novel but occasionally in shot selection too.
