Not Telling the Story the Way It Happened: Alfonso Cuarón's Great Expectations
2005; Salisbury University; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoDirector Alfonso Cuaron and screenwriter Mitch Glazer's adaptation of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow) places novel's story of Pip's unrequited love for beautiful Estella in a contemporary American setting. Dickens's Pip is renamed Finnegan Bell, or Finn; sterile and decaying Satis House becomes overgrown and unkempt (but lushly green) former plantation Paradiso Perduto; eccentric and isolated Miss Havisham becomes cocktail-swilling Ms. Dinsmoor (Anne Bancroft); and blacksmith Joe Gargery, Pip's friend and adoptive father, becomes fisherman and handyman Joe Coleman (Chris Cooper). Great Expectations (1998) transforms marshes of Pip's childhood into Florida Gulf Coast and nineteenth-century London, where Pip goes to be educated as a gentleman, into late-twentieth-century New York, where Finn (supported, like Pip, by a mysterious benefactor) goes to become an artist. Estella remains Estella, object of male desire and of male gaze in both book and film. Although this contemporary version of Dickens's novel has acquired a reputation for being poorly reviewed in its initial release (Tibbetts and Welsh, for example, remark the scathing reviews justly accorded [96]), film also received a number of positive reviews in such major publications as New York Times, Salon magazine, People, and Rolling Stone. I suggest that with recent critical and commercial success of director Cuaron's YTu Mama Tambien (2001 ), time has come for a reevaluation of Great Expectations, especially one that takes into account skills and artistry of director Cuaron and his longtime collaborator, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who worked both films. Even initial reviews of Great Expectations note visually appealing mise en scene created by Cuaron, Lubezki, and production designer Tony Burrough. For example, while praising genuine romantic spirit of and delicate performances of Hawke and Paltrow, Peter Travers primarily applauds film's ravishing color (64). David Anson, reviewing film for Newsweek, commends Cuaron's sensually charged visual sense and notes that film was lusciously by Burrough and beautifully shot by Lubezki (61). In a New York Times review, Janet Maslin writes, largely because Mr. Cuaron is such a visual stylist, this 'Great Expectations' is capable of wonder (10). Even a generally negative review by David Sterritt pauses to credit Lubezki's colorful camera ( 16). In addition to recognizing voluptuous beauty of mise en scene, I would argue that film's visual elements suggest interpretive possibilities only implied by script-that carefully designed camera work of Cuaron and Lubezki contributes to meaning(s) of film in ways that critics and scholars have not adequately explored. I also place my discussion in context of continuing efforts to create a methodology and theoretical framework for analyzing filmed adaptations of literary works. Although studies of adaptations have been common since 1960s, as Imelda Whelehan observes, too often the comparison of a novel and its film version results in an almost unconscious prioritizing of fictional origin over resulting (3). Too many adaptation studies, Robert B. Ray argues, have applied methods adapted from New Criticism that rest on a hierarchy or opposition of original and copy that Jacques Derrida has repeatedly deconstructed and that have failed to acknowledge developments in poststructuralist and postmodern theory that question notion that a text contains a single correct or essential meaning (45). Complicating assessment of Cuaron's Great Expectations is existence not only of original novel but also of several filmed adaptations, and David Lean's 1946 version in particular may have a stronger presence than novel in critical unconscious as a privileged and prior original text against which later copies are measured. …
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