I know, I know … you’re thinking to yourself, why should I care about the (seemingly) 3,074th version they’ve made of “Great Expectations” for film or television?
Short answer: because the new version that came out at the end of last year is one of the most emotionally engaging adaptations of a Charles Dickens’ novel I’ve ever seen.
You may not even be aware of this iteration, directed by Pete Newell (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”) and starring an impressive cast, including Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Jeremy Irvine, Robbie Coltrane and Holliday Grainger. It didn’t get much traction, barely making it into U.S. theaters.
But this may just be the best film of 2013 that nobody saw. Fiennes and Bonham Carter both deserved Oscar nominations for their fine, vibrant performances.
You know the story: a young penniless orphan (Irvine) is given an inheritance and an introduction into London society by an anonymous benefactor. He makes a mush of it, squandering his fortune and falling for a chilly, distant girl protected by her brittle ward, Miss Havisham (Bonham Carter).
Dickens himself felt that “Great Expectations” was his greatest work, but previous movie versions have tended to be stilted and unapproachable. Give this one a chance, and you won’t find yourself disappointed.
Extra features include deleted scenes, a making-of featurettes, photo gallery and more.
Film adaptations of 19th century British and American literature have a tendency to be stiff and remote. The characters in those books were often more like archetypes than flesh-and-blood creatures. They spoke in lilted sentences adored in upper-class salons of the day, but which were unlikely to actually spill out of anyone’s mouth extemporaneously. Movie versions tend to translate this distance between author and audience.
At first I thought “Great Expectations” was falling into this fold, based on Charles Dickens’ classic tale of a blacksmith’s apprentice transformed into a young gentleman. The early section where we’re introduced to the main players and set the plot in motion drags rather badly. Pip is plucked out of obscurity and given a sizeable fortune by a mysterious benefactor.
But something happens along the way. The actors grow comfortable in their roles, director Mike Newell and screenwriter David Nicholls trim away some of the book’s extraneous subplots and characters, and the movie actually grows deeper and richer the further we travel along with it.
By the end, I was fully caught up in the emotional journey of Pip (Jeremy Irvine) and his long-estranged lady love, Estella (Holliday Grainger). Their on-again, off-again affair is somehow both restrained and ravishing.
The cast is just spectacular, with the characters really popping off the screen despite many of them having limited screen time. Jason Felmyng has sort of shy, proud grace as Joe, Pip’s brother-in-law and passive protector. Robbie Coltrone is a fearsome, fulsome presence as Jaggers, the mercenary lawyer put in charge of introducing Pip into society. Ewen Bremner, Sally Hawkins and Olly Alexander are spot-on as, respectively, Jaggers’ assistant Wemmick, Pip’s abusive older sister and best chum Herbert Pocket.
The real standouts are Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes, both of whom deserve consideration when the award season rolls in.
As Miss Havisham, the wealthy spinster who takes young Pip under her wing, Carter is an eerie presence, a victim and victimizer who has shut herself away from life. Abandoned at the altar by a conniving embezzler, she still wears her wedding dress, now reduced to ragged strips, while the mice make a feast on her never-served banquet dinner. She’s both vile and pitiable.
It’s no secret Fiennes can be utterly unnerving onscreen, so his early scenes as escaped convict Abel Magwitch are fraught with terror. Later, while never losing his hard edges -- he’s a willing murderer who sleeps with a blade in his hand -- Magwitch is also exposed as more human than we might have supposed.
Irvine is fine in the lead role, though it’s more of a reactive part where the actor is required to play off of the other, more interesting people around him. Grainger has a nice feel for the coldness inside the heart of Estella, Miss Havisham’s adoptive daughter.
She delivers perhaps the most memorable line of the book and movie: “I have been bent and broken, but -- I hope -- into a better shape.” This surprisingly touching version of “Great Expectations” certainly breaks the mold for this sort of literary adaptation, breathing life into those dusty pages.
This summer's crop of movies featured a lot of disappointments. But one I think just about everyone saw coming was "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time."
An action/adventure from king of schlock Jerry Bruckheimer? Based on a video game? Set in the ancient deserts of Persia? With no actual Persians among the principal cast?
When one considers the progeny of this sun-baked disaster, the question becomes not where did everything go wrong, but how did anyone ever think it would go right.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Dastan, a street urchin-turned-adopted prince of the realm. While sacking an enemy city he finds a magical dagger that can transport the bearer back in time one minute, so they can change the course of events to their favor. Soon Dastan and the dagger's guardian, Tamina (Gemma Arterton), are on the run with everyone pursuing them. Alfred Molina is worth a few yucks as a criminally-minded sheik who despises how the government is taxing his ostrich racetrack.
Mostly, though, it's a stupefying sequence of action scenes where Dastan -- or at least Gyllenhaal's obvious stunt double -- acrobatically leaps about the screen, clashing swords and getting his derring-do on.
I like video games. And I love movies. But the two just weren't meant to be together. Bonus features are rather skimpy in the DVD version, but perk up somewhat in Blu-ray.
The DVD comes only with a making-of documentary that touches on various aspects of production. The single-disc Blu-ray also comes with a single deleted scene: A banquet involving the serving of heads that sounds suspiciously similar to the "monkey brains" scene in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom."
The Blu-ray/DVD combo pack has both these features, plus "The Sands of Time," an interactive feature that links to about 40 featurettes about the making of the film.
"Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" is a big-budget action movie about a magic dagger that can transport its bearer backward in time. I can certainly think of 116 minutes I'd love to have back.
This bewilderingly bad offering from the house of Jerry Bruckheimer is based on a video game. The lineage of movies spawned thusly is not a noble one, and "Prince of Persia" competes for the top spot at the bottom of a deep trough.
How awful do things get? Well, let's start with the fact that star Jake Gyllenhaal does that annoying thing American actors do when they don't want to attempt a foreign accent: A generic English lilt that summons painful aural memories involving Kevin Costner and archery.
I guess Gyllenhaal can't be blamed, since he's the only Yank in an entirely British cast of principles. I'm hardly a disciple of political correctness, but methinks if you're going to have a movie called "Prince of Persia," you might want to have at least one actual Persian.
The video game (actually, a series) involved lots of sword-fighting and acrobatic jumping and tumbling, and director Mike Newell stages his action scenes (clumsily) to look like Gyllenhaal is in the middle of a really challenging level of the game, and we're directing him with our controller.
The intercutting between Gyllenhaal and his stuntmen is pretty obvious, as the professional busts some of those gravity-defying parkour moves, transplanted from an urban setting to pre-Christendom Arabia. Then we cut back to the star touching down.
The plot, courtesy of three screenwriters, is a whirling dervish of pseudo-history and made-up mythology.
Tus (Richard Coyle), the crown prince of Persia, orders his troops to invade the city of Alamut after discovering some trumped-up evidence they're secretly forging weapons. Dastan (Gyllenhaal), the youngest brother whom the king adopted as a street urchin, is the hero of the battle, even though he opposed the attack.
Dastan finds a magic dagger that contains the Sands of Time. When you press a button on the hilt, you travel backward in time one minute, and can prevent bad things from happening. The sands are consumed, but Tamina (Gemma Arterton), the Alamutian princess, is the dagger's guardian and knows how to get more.
The king is fatally poisoned, and Dastan catches the blame, forcing he and Tamina to flee for their lives, ratcheting up a standard-issue love/hate relationship. I won't reveal who the real villain is, other than to point out Ben Kingsley is hanging around, playing the uncle and wearing a lot of eyeliner. Just sayin'.
Alfred Molina turns up as a shady sheikh who runs an ostrich-racing operation, has a deadly African knife guy as his best friend, and delivers a lot of angry tirades about the government taking all his money through taxes to spend on stuff he doesn't like. I think the Tea Party just found its Adam.
Anyway, things devolve into a seemingly endless series of battles and acrobatics, with everybody trying to get their hands on the dagger -- and the fate of the entire world hanging in the balance, of course.
And speaking of that dagger: If the wielder goes back in time a minute, wouldn't the dagger also travel backward, and thus still have its sand? So theoretically you could just keep pushing the button over and over. Maybe even ... 116 times?
