entertainment

Lower your expectations for this one

By Gordon Flurkey ⋅ March 4, 1998 ⋅  Email this article ⋅  Print this article ⋅ Post a comment

Don’t expect too much from Great Expectations, inspite of what those months of fancy promotional campaigns have led you to believe. This latest screen adaptation of a Charles Dickens novel is a monolith of stone-faced acting and sappy movie techniques.

Facile alterna-hunk Ethan Hawke stars as a gifted but impoverished painter who meets wealthy Gwyneth Paltrow, courtesy of crazy spinster Anne Bancroft, during their childhood in Florida. He pursues her fruitlessly until she leaves for school. Their paths cross again, however, when a mysterious benefactor funds Hawke’s social ascension and Paltrow re-enters his life, this time engaged to Hank Azaria.

The movie is melodramatic through and through; but for the first 40 minutes or so, the film is silly but beautifully filmed, and hypnotic enough to compensate for its lack of subtlety and subtance. After Hawke grows up, however, Great Expectations quickly plummets in quality, transforming into a disorienting fusion of heavy-breathing Zalman King knockoffs (Red Shoe Diaries Presents: Great Expectations), overheated 1930s-style New York melodramas, and unusually expensive perfume commercials.

The laughably inane script is inarguably the culprit of the film’s ultimate failure. But Hawke and Paltrow should also be recognized for their contributions, giving their characters all the passion and emotion of department-store mannequins. Paltrow, who has been much better elsewhere, is lovely and radiant throughout the movie, but she seems to be in a fierce competition with Hawke to see which actor can best impersonate a door knob.

Director Alfonso Cuarón (A Little Princess) tried his darnedest best to chisel a dreamy look for the film, but it was not enough to save the movie from being yet another aggressively brainless bastardization of a classic novel.

Grade: B-