Culture

Varying expectations

February 07, 2012
The 1999 film of Great Expectations was edited after previews to make Estella more likeable
The 1999 film of Great Expectations was edited after previews to make Estella more likeable
The ongoing “Dickens on Screen” season at the British Film Institute celebrates over a hundred years of screen adaptations of Dickens’s novels, to mark the author’s bicentenary year. Daniel Tyler looks back at four striking adaptations of Great Expectations and asks, why have filmmakers swapped Dickens’s equivocal ending for a happy reunion?

Although Dickens revised his novel so that it ends less dismally than originally intended, his final version is not the “happy ending” that some critics mistakenly suppose it to be. Estella’s final words to Pip are “we shall continue friends apart.” Pip’s response—“I saw the shadow of no future parting from her”—may contain a glimmer of hope amid the oblique wording, but it hardly constitutes an entirely upbeat conclusion.

David Aylott (dir.), The Boy and the Convict (1909)

Dickens proved attractive to the very earliest filmmakers, perhaps because of his inherently visual writing style. One of the first cinematic reworkings of Great Expectations was a 12-minute silent film, directed by David Aylott, called The Boy and the Convict. Partly due to the difficulties of presenting an intricate story through silent film, it offered a plotline stripped down to the barest details of the Pip and Magwitch story. This was the first adaptation to confer a decidedly happy ending on Pip as, although the Miss Havisham/Estella storyline is entirely absent, at the end of the film the former-convict blesses the hero’s love for his daughter, who was conveniently introduced just a scene earlier.

David Lean (dir.), Great Expectations (1946)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXyo68s-f1E

The classic adaptation of the novel, David Lean’s version opens with the voice of Pip speaking the first paragraph of the novel, with the book itself present on screen. It is a fitting start to a memorable film, which is more true to the verbal life of the original novel than is any other adaptation.

Produced immediately after the second world war, Lean gives the film a more cheerful end than the book strictly allows. As in the novel, Pip returns to Satis House and meets Estella. But unlike in the novel, the house is still standing and Estella sits in Miss Havisham’s chair, herself beginning to lose track of time, settling down “away from the world and all its complications.” John Mill’s Pip is stirred into action. He cries, “Then I defy her! I have come back, Miss Havisham! I have come back. To let in the sunlight.” And he proceeds, heroically, to tear down the curtains from the tall, dusty windows, and the grey room is filled with new light. It is a visually effective scene but also a remarkable realising of the delusory romantic visions which Pip had been disabused of in the novel: when he had hoped “to restore the desolate house, [and] admit the sunshine into the dark rooms.”

Alfonso Cuaron (dir), Great Expectations (1998)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bq8BsIZejE

Alfonso Cuaron’s 1998 Hollywood remake of Great Expectations was a re-envisioning and a reimagining, rather than an adaptation. Starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Estella, and Ethan Hawke as the Pip-character, known here as Finn, the film was set in the Florida Gulf and Manhattan. Satis House becomes the mansion, Paradiso Perdito, and Miss Havisham becomes Anne Bancroft’s ballroom-dancing Miss Dinsmoor. If the story of “Pip” was, through the suggestive resonance of his name, the beginning, the source, the seed of the tale, the story of “Finn” is, by an equal suggestion, its culmination, its final limit.

The film conveyed Pip/Finn’s desperate passion effectively, in contrast to John Mill’s stiff-lipped disappointment. And the painfulness of the embarrassment Joe’s return causes was poignant—Joe is a lowly fisherman in the film, but his surname,”Coleman,” is a nod to his original’s life amid the fires of the blacksmith’s forge. In the end, the story takes a familiarly conventional turn. After disappointing preview screenings, the film was re-edited to make Paltrow’s Estella more likeable. Finally, Finn and Estella are reunited, looking forward to what seems a promising future.

Brian Kirk (dir.), Great Expectations, BBC (2011)

There is a tendency in adaptations of Great Expectations to turn Pip and Estella into a conventional romantic pair. In Lean’s adaptation, when they drink tea at a London hotel and speak in perfect RP, they could be the stars of any other of his films. In Cuaron’s version, with Hawke and Paltrow in the lead roles, their characters sometimes resemble movie stars more than Dickens’s creations. And in the latest BBC adaptation, Pip and Estella seem like nothing so much as stock romantic characters. In a cringe-inducing moment in the second of three episodes, for example, we find them together, splashing about barefooted in a lake near Satis House.

There are many redeeming features along the way: notably the striking scene of Miss Havisham’s death by fire, where we watch her tattered dress slowly succumb to the blaze as we hear an organ wedding march gently played. Eventually, the adaptation goes the way of all the versions of Great Expectations except for the novel as Pip and Estella reunite, touching hands, gazing into each other’s eyes and, we are given no reason to doubt, a shared future.

Daniel Tyler is Leverhulme Research Fellow in English Literature at Oxford University. His book A Guide to Dickens' London is out next month from Hesperus Press