Great Expectations isn't just Charles Dickens's best book. It's also his soapiest. Of all the novels he wrote in instalments, it's this that most graphically caters to the cliffhanger, drips with deadline sweat and amps up the action at every chapter's close. So it takes a special type of talent to turn it into a film quite this flat.
Mike Newell (of Four Weddings fame) must take the lion's share of blame, but a chunk too should be saved for One Day's David Nicholls, who supplies a York Notes adaptation, a bowdlerised whistlestop tour round keynote scenes. He appears to have extracted not just much of the book's humour – early scenes with Mrs Joe (Sally Hawkins), Mr Joe (Jason Flemyng) and young Pip fall notably flat, despite David Walliams moonlighting as Pumblechook – but also its meat.
When Pip goes gent he skips ickily round some butchered cattle at Spitalfields and the whole movie mimics his distaste for heart and guts, muck and blood – in fact, in a way, for Dickens. (That said, it's worth mentioning a final reel shot of remarkable gristle; the sort of thing that may linger more vividly in the minds of any 12-year-olds cadging on the classics than the actual plot.)
Only Ralph Fiennes's Leonard Rossiter-channelling Magwitch seems to have actually stepped from the pages; Helena Bonham Carter's eagerly-awaited Miss Havisham is a bit of a damp pancake. Where you want her to give it some welly, she tiptoes back from panto and fails to emerge from the shadows. If anything, she seems to have muted her workaday mad-haired, frock-horror romantic goth shtick.
Jeremy Irvine's Pip – like Douglas Booth's in the recent TV adaptation – is too plain pretty for the callow squit of the book. Scenes of sweaty blacksmithery could have been spliced from a Levis ad, while Holliday Grainger's Estella, rather than a porcelain figurine, feels a much more modern dolly, the sort with big red hair and button on their backs that means they can squeak "I can't feel anything" with wonky wink.
Newell's film pulls off that rarest of tricks: by illuminating the book in such harsh light, you come away thinking the less of it. It is, on reflection, a novel of such high camp and fruitloop melodrama, that the David Lean treatment – monochrome, big on strings and fog – seems the only way to go. Even Ethan Hawke's 1998 version had a certain trashy glamour. This simply feels superfluous.
