Nearly all of Alfonso Cuarón’s Hollywood films are adaptations, but the most enduring literary classic he took on resulted in his most underrated movie. Twenty-five years ago this week, Cuarón’s version of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations hit theaters, to a largely underwhelmed response from both audiences and critics. Even Cuarón himself disparaged the movie in later years, but it’s a sumptuous, emotionally rich romantic drama with an especially strong supporting performance from Gwyneth Paltrow at the height of her fame. Dickens purists may find the deviations from the source material too substantial, but Cuarón makes this story of romantic longing feel as epic as his big blockbuster spectacles.
Cuarón and screenwriter Mitch Glazer keep the general outline of Dickens’ 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-century English seaside town and training to become a blacksmith, Finn is an aspiring artist who trains as a commercial fisherman, living on Florida’s Gulf Coast in the 1980s and ’90s.
He’s 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’s version of Dickens’ Miss Havisham. Like Miss Havisham, Ms. Dinsmoor hires Finn as a companion and introduces him to Estella, with whom he falls immediately in love.
Dickens’ novel is full of danger and violence, but Cuarón 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’s estate Paradiso Perduto, like she’s an ethereal creature visiting from another realm. Paltrow carries over that mystical quality in her portrayal of the older Estella, but Cuarón and Glazer make sure that Estella is never just an object of desire. Paltrow conveys Estella’s deep melancholy even as both the movie and Finn himself are caught up in Finn’s own tortured emotions.
The story still begins with Finn’s terrifying encounter with an escaped convict, here renamed Arthur Lustig (Robert De Niro). Lustig’s presence in Finn’s life is scaled back, though, and his climactic reappearance is more effective as a reflection of Finn’s self-doubt than as a resolution to the thinly sketched crime narrative. Cuarón 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.

Each time Estella reappears, Paltrow instantly draws all of the viewer’s attention, just as she draws Finn’s. Great Expectations falls in the middle of a period of vibrant, magnetic performances from Paltrow, including The Talented Mr. Ripley, Emma, and her Oscar-winning role in Shakespeare in Love. It’s obvious why people are drawn to Estella, who has the same regal, patrician bearing as Paltrow herself. There’s also that sense of sadness behind her eyes, from someone who’s 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.
Cuarón 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.
Dickens’ novels are grounded in gritty, realistic details, even if the plots are full of outlandish twists, but Cuarón’s Great Expectations 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’s a woozy, heightened romantic moment, indicative of the characters’ emotions more than any grounded actions.
“I’m not going to tell the story the way it happened,” Finn says in the opening narration. “I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.” The entire film is suffused with that dreamlike feel, and Finn’s narration adds a wistful poetic quality, even if the words come from an uncredited David Mamet rather than from Dickens. Cuarón elegantly merges the literary and the painterly, making his Great Expectations into a unified, immersive work of art.
“Great Expectations” is available for digital rental or purchase.