78. Great Expectations

The Charles Dickens classic coming-of-age story gets a facelift into a modern romance, but that doesn’t make the main character’s life any easier this time around.

At age ten, 'Finn' Bell is hired by millionairess Ms. Nora Dinsmoor (Anne Bancroft) to sketch pictures of and occupy the time of her ten-year old niece, Estella. Finn is out of his element being a poor boy in the company of two rich and manipulative women, but he can’t refuse Ms. Dinsmoor’s money any more than can deny his infatuation with Estella. In truth, Dinsmoor is training Estella to poison the hearts of men, but Finn is too innocent to see that he is the one she is practicing on. As a young adult, Finn (Ethan Hawke) gives up his artistic dreams when Estella (Gwyneth Paltrow) is sent off to school in Europe and seemingly lost to him forever, but a mysterious benefactor changes everything by giving Finn the opportunity to make his lost dreams a reality.

The opening scenes of Ms. Dinsmoor secretly watching Estella practice her manipulations on Finn as children are timeless, a dreamlike fantasy set against the adult world of New York City and its art community. The neglected mansion home of Ms. Dinsmoor is a rotting but fascinating creature (much like Dinsmoor herself), while Finn uses New York to set himself apart from who he was before and, after he meets Estella again, become more like the man he thinks Estella would accept. The production wisely maintains the contrast between these places and the mansion’s condition as Finn’s character returns there and sees it differently each time, all the way up to the film’s conclusion.

This modern retelling of the classic story has all the elements of a tragedy, but strings them along with enough hope to keep everything interesting. A doomed romance is now the centerpiece of the story, and watching each meeting of Finn and Estella with renewed hope only to see it dwindle away again is little more painful each time. Dinsmoor has poisoned the heart of her niece, but Finn cannot help but hope that true love will somehow cure it and bring Estella to him.

Ethan Hawke carries the film with a haunted-but-hopeful yearning as he finds and loses his dreams, and each event builds a visible intensity waiting to explode. Gwyneth Paltrow is easy to dislike in this film, but it is a credit to her ability as an actress that her character is so dislikable (as we can plainly see what she is doing to Finn while he seemingly cannot) that viewers transfer that dislike to the actress herself. The real villain of the piece is Anne Bancroft playing Dinsmoor, oozing hatred while dangling pretty words of hope in front of impressionable young minds; Dinsmoor doesn’t have to be false in order to be cruel, and Ms. Bancroft plays Dinsmoor as a choice of evil instead of merely its product.

 Robert De Niro plays a mysterious convict that Finn meets as a child and again later in life, but the part has been so far removed from the updated story that it unnecessarily lengthens a movie that might have had a tighter, shorter running time instead. While this 1998 telling of Great Expectations doesn’t end as timelessly as it began, the hope that one person’s passion can win out against the poison of another’s heart certainly is. (Kevin A. Ranson)