Great Expectations

How can you tell whether something you remember really happened, or how, or why? These are some of the questions posed by Finnegan Bell (Ethan Hawke), the Pip stand-in in Alfonso Cuarón's visually lush, snazzily stylish, and emotionally inert updating of Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations.

Actually there are more compelling questions that come to mind. Why make this movie at all after it had been consummately adapted by David Lean in 1946? Why dump the original's richly nuanced, endearing characters for stereotypes, or its superbly crafted plot for a clumsy MTV farrago of a narrative? Why boggle minds with a novelization of a movie based on a novel (Great Expectations, not by Dickens, now available in paperback)? Wouldn't the film be more compelling had Robert De Niro and Anne Bancroft exchanged parts? And why the heck didn't they just take a cab in the film's ridiculous climax?

Not that this Great Expectations is a total disappointment. Mexican filmmaker Cuarón's A Little Princess is one of the most magical adaptations of a children's book, and this film has a painterly sense of color, composition, and mood and the grand sweep of an over-orchestrated piece of minor music. That's evident from the first scene, when dreamy, 10-year-old budding artist Finn (Jeremy James Kissner) sits in a dinghy in the Gulf Coast sketching the local pastoral splendor. A blood-red smear in the surf transforms into Lustig (Robert De Niro), a manacled convict, who demands that Finn help him with his escape. It proves a brief, intense adventure, leaving Finn suspicious that he too might have manacles he must break.

That feeling grows when Ms. Dinsmoor (Anne Bancroft, mugging and winking brutally in her gaudy togs, impossible wigs, and cigarette holders), a wealthy old woman gone mad with a broken heart, invites Finn over to be the playmate of her pretty ward, the cold and haughty Estella. In a splendidly shot scene bordering on kiddie porn, she kisses him at a drinking fountain, and Finn is hooked. Years pass, they continue to play together, growing up into Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow. After one last tease, Estella abandons him, breaking his heart.

Finn resigns himself to the beer-swilling fisherman's life of his dumb but lovable guardian Joe (Chris Cooper) until a mysterious benefactor pays for his introduction into the Manhattan art world. Cuarón's parody of the pretense and splendor of this demi-monde dims before his delight in it: Finn poses as an idealistic rebel before the greedy cynicism of the gallery owners and rich collectors, but his subsequent callow ambition is more convincing. But Life and mishandled plotting has its surprises -- Estella returns, and following the inexplicable and unfortunate trend that has surfaced in Titanic and As Good As It Gets, poses for some bad nudes (Francesco Clemente provides Finn's artwork, a wry commentary on the character's cartoonish one-dimensionality). After some messy, unnecessary complications, all ends with perfect teeth and great clothes on a beach at sundown. It may not be Dickens, it certainly isn't great, but what did you expect? At the Copley Place, the Harvard Square, and the Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.

-- Peter Keough