Great Expectations vs Reality
Book before film is my usual mantra. The thought of paging through Game of Thrones, having watched the series seems tiresome. Harry Potter may have played true to word, if not better, but I found The Golden Compass a little disappointing after having His Dark Materials read to me before bed every night.An element of the beauty in literature is the individual interpretation; the characters you create within the little movie reel running within your head. Having now read Great Expectations, and consequently binge watched the BBC tv series, I must say that I am highly disappointed in Estella’s hair colour.Stellar. Star. Shining painfully white and bright, should it not? Who am I to dabble in the casting and feud between brunettes and blondes, but I imagined her akin to Miss Havisham; lustrous white curls and sharp blue eyes. An ice queen conviction (fancying myself as similarly coldhearted darling but forever wishing that my Tinder game was better), she ran as a blonde in my head. Miss Havisham, similarly, didn’t play true to word. Returning to Harry Potter, I immediately cast an aged Mcgonagall in my thoughts, bent and crooked with yellow skin. The actress in the BBC’s adaptation exhibited a far more youthful fragrancy, akin to what perhaps Estella should have displayed. White as a ghost she was, you can give her that.
We can all understand the need to chop and change scripts when condensing hundreds of pages and thousands of words into less than two hours. The BBC went a stage further and allowed a generous three episodes to cover Dickens’ novel, but the Aged P sadly didn’t make the cut. Wemmick was not only left parentless (without the weathered relative we all have in residence somewhere, to whom one must speak VERY LOUDLY, and with whom naps are considered prime entertainment), but with very little mention as to his humble abode at Walworth. My brain hereby struggled to create its own interpretation of Walworth. A miniature manor situated in London with £1million in todays money buying you a few inches of floorspace in somebody’s attic, and an old mattress if you’re lucky. Home grown rhubarb and a drawbridge? Surely the council would have off with your heads before the morning canon could be fired. Either way, I was excited to see what the BBC had envisioned for the miniature country manor to which Wemmick withdrew, and disheartened by the name only being mentioned in passing.
That isn’t to say that the adaptation has not its perks. Douglas Booth’s lips, for one, are primed to rival those of Kylie Jenner. A top class male model right out of the forge, surprisingly clean and well groomed considering his situations, but displaying an artistically sweaty chest for effect. The character of Herbert also surpassed my expectations, with a fond smile and soft spot for his sweetheart. The ending could also be deemed more satisfactory than that of Dickens’ novel – we wait expectantly throughout for the young pair to exchange kisses and swan off into the sunset, only to have Dickens’ ambiguous ending leaving a wistful parting as likely as tying the knot and running off into the sunset.
All in all, I have spent the week engrossed in the brazen humour and flamboyancy of Dickens’ characters, and three hours of yesterday engulfed in blankets on the sofa enjoying the BBC miniseries. Whilst the BBC adaptation lacks some of the literary artistry and witticism, and particularly lacks one particular Aged Parent knocked back at the fireplace, it does provide a concise tale of young Pip, in his exploration of values and the heart.