Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow in Great Expectations. Posted by Alamy
Gwyneth Paltrow's recent victory in one of the strangest court cases in Utah in recent memory has changed the image of the actress and entrepreneur in the public eye. Ever since she launched the lucrative but derided health and lifestyle brand Goop in 2008, Paltrow has become synonymous with a sort of self-righteous provocation: take a look, if you dare, at her vagina-scented candles (yours for as little as $75) or her «Vampire Psychic Spray».
For someone who was once considered one of the brightest actors of her generation — and an Oscar winner, to boot — she seemed to have long since stopped making any effort on screen, bank checks for her appearances in Marvel films as Iron Man's love interest. The last significant role she took on was in 2008 in James Gray's Two Lovers: now she seems to have retired from the screen in favor of goop-ing.
However, for a woman who has been both envied and ridiculed over the past two decades, her presence on the podium has done much to redeem her reputation. Not only was the case brought against her by retired optometrist Terry Sanderson clearly without merit—he claimed she crashed into him while skiing in 2016 and caused him injuries, including brain damage, and she counterclaimed for $1 and her legal fees. — but she assured the booth performance, while unusual, reminded many observers why she became such an iconic figure in the late night and early noughties. When asked how the accident affected her, Paltrow remarked, «Well, I lost half a day skiing»; a joke that launched a thousand memes in one night.
It remains unclear whether the goodwill generated by her success will lead to a resumption of her acting career, or whether demands to sell fancy toothpaste juicers on Goop (only £170) will continue to sap her energy. Still, living thousands of miles from Utah, former Anglophile Paltrow (once, if we remember, married Coldplay's Chris Martin) might rejoice at the news that a new, derided adaptation of «Great Expectations». with Olivia Colman as Miss Havisham. Much of the criticism of the Stephen Knight-scripted series revolved around its apparently anachronistic focus on swearing, sex, and violence, including everything from foul-mouthed Pip to Mr. Pumblechook Matt Berry engaging in sadomasochistic antics.
However, Paltrow herself appeared in another adaptation of the novel 25 years ago, making the new version fairly modest in its liberties. It received indifferent reviews and was almost rejected by its creators. But this bold, sexy and flamboyant interpretation has to be one of the most exciting versions of Dickens ever to hit the screen — and without a carriage or horses in sight.
Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón is now arguably best known as the Oscar-winning director behind Gravity and Roma, not to mention making the best Harry Potter movie ever. But it was his second painting, The Little Princess in 1995, that first brought him international attention. An adaptation of the children's novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, initially a commercial failure, but critically acclaimed for its colorful and light-hearted, but always respectful treatment of the plot.
Subsequently, Cuarón was approached by Hollywood super producer Art Linson, who had a simple idea: what would Great Expectations be like if its setting were moved from Victorian London to contemporary Florida and New York? David Lean's 1946 film became a classic, but there hasn't been a cinematic version in the intervening half century. Linson believed that the modern interpretation is perhaps conveying something of the spirit of William Shakespeare's equally irreverent «Romeo» of Baz Luhrmann; Juliet, also made by 20th Century Fox, would be exciting and potentially award-winning. Cuarón turned down the project «many times» but eventually agreed and began to assemble a suitable cast.
He offered the lead roles of protagonist Pip's alleged and real benefactor, Miss Havisham and Magwitch respectively, to Anne Bancroft and Robert De Niro, both of whom were eager to star in this modernized Dickens. (Character names were changed for the film.) Cuarón approached Ethan Hawke, then a survivor of the success of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, to play Pip, now renamed Finn and reimagined as a financially backed aspiring artist. enter the notoriously difficult to understand Manhattan art scene.
Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Dinsmoor, the film adaptation of Miss Havisham. Image Credit & Copyright: Alamy
Hawke's first reaction was to turn down the role. As he later said, “I am proud to have known that the second I met [Cuaron] he would become one of the great directors, but I had no desire to do this film. The whole novel was about class, and I really felt that if you were going to make a movie about class in America, then this Pip had to be Hispanic or African American — a person of color.» Cuarón convinced him otherwise. “Alfonso totally disagreed, he loved Before Sunrise and he wanted me to play the part…he was absolutely irresistible.”
Hawke spoke highly of his co-stars De Niro («no kidding guy… I learned a lot from him as I waited for people's permission to let me do the work I wanted to do») and Bancroft, but Estella's choice proved to be decisive, the cruelly distant potential love of Pip/Finn. As Cuarón said at the time of the film's release, «The actors that are in the film are basically the ones that I first talked about with Art Linson, and when it came to Gwyneth, I said hello to her and she started talking to me, I spoke fluently on -Spanish, so I thought, «This will make things easier.»
If this was Estella-esque manipulation, Cuarón soon discovered that Paltrow could be as fickle as her character: «She promised to make me a paella, but she never did.»
Ethan Hawke and Robert De Niro in Great Expectations. Author: Alamy
Yet for Paltrow, the challenge as Estella, who emotionally and sexually manipulates Finn even as she prepares to marry plutocrat Hank Azaria, was how to humanize one of literature's most enigmatic women. When asked at a 1998 press conference if she sympathized with the character, «is that really you, or is it different?» — Paltrow laughed: «Yes, I'm the same as her, so beware»,
«It was quite difficult because she is a woman who is very out of touch with her emotional fabric.» she came. «It's easy to read [the script] and think, 'I understand her, she's cold and bitchy and manipulative'… [but] I was trying to figure out what [Miss Havisham] said to this girl to encourage her to be that mean, and it really is tragic. It's a form of child abuse, and so I tried to give it as much compassion as possible.»
The film was superbly shot by Cuarón's regular collaborator Emmanuel «Chivo» Lubezki in Florida, using rich greens in the color palette, and had a hip soundtrack that featured everyone from Tori Amos to Iggy Pop and included Like from Pulp. A friend for a key sequence in which Estella shows up at Finn's studio, poses naked for him, and then disappears again, leaving him (and the audience) breathless. Another contemporary twist: Paltrow's green wardrobe was created specifically for the Donna Karan film.
Gwyneth Paltrow as Estella in Movie Great Expectations. Image Credit & Copyright: Alami
The finished picture is witty, poignant, superbly played by a fine cast, including Chris Cooper as Joe Coleman, replacing Joe Gargery, who is humiliatingly rejected by his now successful nephew. a central novel that adds color and nuance to the novel, albeit with a less ambiguous and more Hollywood ending.
However, upon its release in early 1998, it failed to receive critical and commercial acclaim, and failed to regain «Little Princess» recognition. Hawke alternately blamed James Cameron's then-recent release of Titanic («nobody cared about anything but Titanic») and the difficulty Knight now faces in trying to adapt Dickens in an unconventional way. As he said in 2022: “We could never match what Dickens did. It doesn't matter if you have director Alfonso Cuarón. You are making a charcoal sketch of an oil painting by Dickens. It was much deeper.»
And Cuarón subsequently almost disowned the film, calling it variously a «horrible experience» and «a complete failure… I let myself be sucked in for the wrong reasons.» He suggested that the script, written by Scrooged writer Mitch Glaser, was missing and that «I've become cocky in the sense that we can convey it visually. We can compensate visually.»
Many claim that Cuarón did it. Of course, even though he went on to make a very different Mexican road movie, Y Tu Mamá También, the brilliance and beauty of this most unconventional of Dickensian adaptations continues to be deceiving, even as successive versions fade from memory.
And while Paltrow's subsequent career was filled with great highs (Shakespeare in Low, The Talented Mr. Ripley) and embarrassing lows (Sylvia, Mortdecai), her multifaceted performance as Estella is what something charismatic, disgusting, sympathetic and witty. all at once — remains one of her best on-screen watches. She may have regained the public's love with her courtroom jokes, but it's helpful to go back to Great Expectations and remember why everyone fell in love with her in the first place.
The Dickens novel famously ends with the line: «I have not seen a shadow of another separation from her.» Perhaps this applies equally to the world and to Gwyneth Paltrow. But please, less vagina-scented candles and more beautiful performances with nuances. Am I asking that much?
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