Cuar\u00f3n and screenwriter Mitch Glazer keep the general outline of Dickens\u2019 story, although they update the location and time period and change some of the main character names. The protagonist is now Finn Bell, played as a young boy by Jeremy James Kissner and as a teen and adult by Ethan Hawke. Rather than a prototypical Dickensian orphan living in a 19th<\/sup>-century English seaside town and training to become a blacksmith, Finn is an aspiring artist who trains as a commercial fisherman, living on Florida\u2019s Gulf Coast in the 1980s and \u201990s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He\u2019s still an orphan, raised mainly by the kind-hearted boyfriend of his deadbeat older sister Maggie (Kim Dickens). Joe (Chris Cooper) teaches Finn to fish and encourages his artistic dreams. Joe also connects Finn with reclusive heiress Nora Dinsmoor (Anne Bancroft), the movie\u2019s version of Dickens\u2019 Miss Havisham. Like Miss Havisham, Ms. Dinsmoor hires Finn as a companion and introduces him to Estella, with whom he falls immediately in love. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Dickens\u2019 novel is full of danger and violence, but Cuar\u00f3n focuses on the swooning romance between Finn and Estella, including some beautifully sensual love scenes. The young Estella (Raquel Beaudene) makes her entrance emerging from the lush overgrowth surrounding Ms. Dinsmoor\u2019s estate Paradiso Perduto, like she\u2019s an ethereal creature visiting from another realm. Paltrow carries over that mystical quality in her portrayal of the older Estella, but Cuar\u00f3n and Glazer make sure that Estella is never just an object of desire. Paltrow conveys Estella\u2019s deep melancholy even as both the movie and Finn himself are caught up in Finn\u2019s own tortured emotions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The story still begins with Finn\u2019s terrifying encounter with an escaped convict, here renamed Arthur Lustig (Robert De Niro). Lustig\u2019s presence in Finn\u2019s life is scaled back, though, and his climactic reappearance is more effective as a reflection of Finn\u2019s self-doubt than as a resolution to the thinly sketched crime narrative. Cuar\u00f3n understands that this is a story about Finn and Estella, even as Estella disappears for long stretches of the movie, while Finn is busy working as a fisherman or rising in the New York City art world thanks to a mysterious benefactor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cuar\u00f3n matches the captivating central performances with gorgeous visuals, taking a cue from the verdant Florida landscape to fill the costume and set design with eye-popping shades of green. Even when the story shifts from Florida to New York, green continues to dominate, and nearly every outfit that Estella wears is some variation on the color of flourishing nature. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Dickens\u2019 novels are grounded in gritty, realistic details, even if the plots are full of outlandish twists, but Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s Great Expectations<\/em> feels more like a fable, set in fantastical versions of real places. When Finn barges into a restaurant where Estella is eating with her snooty fiance Walter Plane (Hank Azaria) and asks her to dance, they dance right out into the street, and then seemingly right into bed. It\u2019s a woozy, heightened romantic moment, indicative of the characters\u2019 emotions more than any grounded actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m not going to tell the story the way it happened,\u201d Finn says in the opening narration. \u201cI\u2019m going to tell it the way I remember it.\u201d The entire film is suffused with that dreamlike feel, and Finn\u2019s narration adds a wistful poetic quality, even if the words come from an uncredited David Mamet rather than from Dickens. Cuar\u00f3n elegantly merges the literary and the painterly, making his Great Expectations <\/em>into a unified, immersive work of art. “Great Expectations” is available for digital rental or purchase<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/great-ex2-1024x576.jpg\")
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Each time Estella reappears, Paltrow instantly draws all of the viewer\u2019s attention, just as she draws Finn\u2019s. Great Expectations<\/em> falls in the middle of a period of vibrant, magnetic performances from Paltrow, including The Talented Mr. Ripley<\/em>, Emma<\/em>, and her Oscar-winning role in Shakespeare in Love<\/em>. It\u2019s obvious why people are drawn to Estella, who has the same regal, patrician bearing as Paltrow herself. There\u2019s also that sense of sadness behind her eyes, from someone who\u2019s been trained since birth by her aunt to be cold and distant, as a sort of proxy revenge against the men who wronged Ms. Dinsmoor. Finn mainly sees the toll that takes on himself, but Paltrow makes sure to capture the toll it takes on Estella, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/crookedc-01.svg\")
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