From the misty churchyard to forlorn Satis House, this Great Expectations was wonderful
A small boy runs, frightened, from a lonely churchyard, across a flat, marshy landscape. He starts to cross a little wooden bridge over a muddy creek ? Suddenly a big hand appears from underneath the bridge, grabs the boy's legs, brings him down. The boy shouts out.
"Come 'ere, shut up," growls the escaped convict, to whom the big hand belongs. "You scream again and I'll cut your throat, d'you understand?" Then he turns to the camera and taps his forehead. "Hold on, the latest live odds are coming up on your screen now." And, sure enough, on to the screen the following words are typed: "Pip to get together with Estella in the end: 2/1."
Guess what, that doesn't really happen. Well, the first part does, but not the betting bit. But it kind of happens in my head, and possibly your head too if you watch a lot of sport on TV. It's a problem when an actor with a distinctive voice does an advert that gets a lot of airplay. To me Ray Winstone, who plays Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations (BBC1), is now bet365.com. Who's going to be Jaggers I wonder, the "simples" meerkat? Oh, it's Poirot, but David Suchet is more of a chameleon than Winstone is.
Actually, to be fair, if you can banish bet365 from your head, Ray Winstone is a brilliant Magwitch ? rough and gruff and terrifying, but with just a twinkle of kindness and humanity under the mud and the blood. The whole opening scene is perfect; misty and spooky, with the hulks ? the prison ships from one of which Magwitch has escaped ? at anchor in the distance. Frame for frame, it's almost exactly as it was in my head, though I'm not sure how much of that came from reading Great Expectations a long, long time ago, and how much from previous screen adaptations. Anyway, it's wonderful.
Satis House is, too ? cold, dusty and cobwebbed, forgotten and forlorn. I see some people have been moaning that Gillian Anderson isn't old enough to be Miss Havisham, that she's a cougar rather than a crone, too ravishing for Havisham. She's not that ravishing, though. They've done a pretty good job of ageing and witchifying her. And, more importantly, she feels like Miss Havisham ? not overdone like a pantomime witch but quietly sad, bitter and vengeful, cruelly manipulative, and more than a little potty.
Some Dickens scholars are always going to get upset by any adaptation. They are going to get upset by the end of this one too, as it will coincide neither with Dickens's original ending nor with his revised ending, but will steer a kind of compromise course, between the two. That's part of a Dickens scholar's job though, to get upset and argue.
The rest of us can sit back and enjoy it. And I certainly did. It doesn't just look right, it feels right too ? sensory, visceral and totally Dickensian, this non scholar but enthusiast would say. But still both resonant and relevant.
There are stand-out performances wherever you look: from Mr bet365, from Anderson, from Suchet, from young Oscar Kennedy as young Pip. Obviously we'll be seeing much more of Douglas Booth as older Pip in parts two and three. Did anyone else notice an accent shift with the change in actor, from sort of west country/default peasant to more (and perhaps more appropriately) estuary?
While we're on the subject of small moans to the continuity department, that exotic butterfly display at Satis House, collected by Miss Havisham's brother, she says, from "the furthest reaches of the earth in his quest for the purest specimen of beauty". Well, the one in the middle there, with the orange tips to its wings, is a common Orange Tip ? found all over this country, frequently in my London garden even.
Oh, it doesn't really matter, I suppose. What does matter is it's great. As now are expectations for the rest.
If you watched Fast Freddie, the Widow and Me (ITV) instead, then you're a fool. If you recorded it, you might possibly want to have a look. It's OK, if you're in the mood for undemanding, predictable saccharine ITV sentimentality. Sorry, a "feel good festive drama", I believe is the technical term.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/dec/27/great-expectations-review-sam-wollaston
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