Watching Steven Knight's Great Expectations, after having watched his A Christmas Carol a few years ago, has driven me relentlessly to one conclusion: Knight just doesn't like Dickens. At all. If Knight had been born hating Dickens and hated him more every day of his life, he couldn't have done him more dirty than he has.
Once again we have the characters twisted and distorted out of all recognition. Once again we have a woman put in a degrading sexual position by an older man (a relative, in this case). Once again we have Dickens's quicksilver words discarded for clunky, leaden attempts at dialogue, and his odd, fascinating quirks smoothed over, to be replaced with various vices and kinks. Even the music, by Keefus Ciancia, is grim and joyless.
Young Pip is already a teenager when we meet him, already ambitious (and something of a smart mouth), and so we lose his child's sense of wonder and the fear that motivates him to do so much of what he does. It's a grievous loss. We don't get to see him develop as a character, and we don't get any sense of how his early timidity drove and shaped him. But it sets the tone for the rest, as there's little room here for any complexity of motive or character. Nearly everyone's cards are on the table; there's little mystery or mystique anywhere.
The one thing this version has going for it is its cast. Olivia Colman is as fine a Miss Havisham as everyone expected -- coy and smug by turns, burning with eagerness to take her revenge. On the whole, the women do especially well here -- Shalom Brune-Franklin is very good as Estella, and Chloe Lea is even better as Young Estella, her supercilious air so cold it burns. Laurie Ogden as Biddy, meanwhile, is so sweet and wholesome that she appears to have wandered in from another show. The one man who really stood out to me is Ashley Thomas as Jaggers. He's a powerfully menacing presence, though thanks to Knight's sledgehammer style, he's required to be much more forceful than Jaggers should be.
But alas for this cast, they're worthy of a much, much better adaptation than this one. It's one thing to take a beloved old story and to think of all the exciting and fun new things you could do with it. It's quite another thing to murder it in cold blood.
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