Great Expectations (1998, Alfonso Cuaron)
While promoting "Gravity" in a roundtable interview during the 2013 Oscars campaigning season, Alfonso Cuaron mentions (quite candidly) how Great Expectations was not a film he should've made.
He stated to the Hollywood Reporter- "You do your first films with a lot of enthusiasm. I was lucky that my second film was a blissful experience. And then I got a bit engaged in the machinery. I forgot that I used to do my own stuff, and I became this reader of screenplays that they were sending to me. And I started forgetting that I had a voice. It started to become more about the industry. And then I did a film that was a horrible experience, Great Expectations. That is a film that I should have not done. I passed many times, and then I ended up saying yes for the wrong reasons... It's one of those things. I did my first film, and it was well received. And then I was just traveling around, and I started running out of money, I needed to get a job and --... You know, the possibility of working with Robert De Niro… And then I lost my way."
You could say he talks about it as a failure of his. The film is lacking a certain energy that is noticeable in his later work. It should be noted that this film was not written by him but instead by Mitch Glazer (with voiceover written by an uncredited David Mamet). Without that connection to the material that Cuaron definitely had with A Little Princess, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Children of Men and Gravity, Great Expectations is full of style and emotion that is certainly displayed but never felt.
The film attempts to update Charles Dickens' Victorian London-set novel to 1990s Florida and New York. When updating classical material, there is a trend towards giving the adaptation a very vibrant and distinct visual work-over. Updates of Shakespeare plays are a great example. Like how Ralph Fiennes turned Coriolanus into a Hurt Locker-looking gritty wartime drama or Joss Whedon giving that indie-feel to Much Ado About Nothing. Cuaron doesn't go as far as say Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet which kept the original dialogue and over-stylized and saturated the viewer with a distinctly modern style.
Instead, Cuaron settles for an almost middle-ground. The plot is transposed and characters are slightly different (Pip is now Fin). It's more like The Lion King-Hamlet comparison. Patrick Doyle has very loud and classical musical cues that feel out of place and Emmanuel Lubezewski lights like a classical painter as many of the best of cinematographers do. It's just that Cuaron's sense of magic and wizardry that came across in even the wanderlust feeling of Y Tu Mama Tambien, is not apparent in this earlier work. Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow feel dull where their longing and lovesickness feels overly melodramatic. Anne Bancroft and Chris Cooper in supporting roles are amusing, but after a certain point the film feels lost and wandering towards its end as the screenplay by Mitch Glazer seems content with hitting the story-beats of the adaptation without ever making the moments feel three-dimensional and resonant.
Later in his career, Cuaron did find a connection to material he didn't have a hand in writing which would be Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. But that might be because in that same interview from above he states that his film prior to that, Y Tu Mama Tambien, was his rediscovery-as-a-director film- "What we talked about [with Y Tu Mama Tambien] was, let's do the film we would have done before we even went to film school. Let's start from scratch."
He stated to the Hollywood Reporter- "You do your first films with a lot of enthusiasm. I was lucky that my second film was a blissful experience. And then I got a bit engaged in the machinery. I forgot that I used to do my own stuff, and I became this reader of screenplays that they were sending to me. And I started forgetting that I had a voice. It started to become more about the industry. And then I did a film that was a horrible experience, Great Expectations. That is a film that I should have not done. I passed many times, and then I ended up saying yes for the wrong reasons... It's one of those things. I did my first film, and it was well received. And then I was just traveling around, and I started running out of money, I needed to get a job and --... You know, the possibility of working with Robert De Niro… And then I lost my way."
You could say he talks about it as a failure of his. The film is lacking a certain energy that is noticeable in his later work. It should be noted that this film was not written by him but instead by Mitch Glazer (with voiceover written by an uncredited David Mamet). Without that connection to the material that Cuaron definitely had with A Little Princess, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Children of Men and Gravity, Great Expectations is full of style and emotion that is certainly displayed but never felt.
The film attempts to update Charles Dickens' Victorian London-set novel to 1990s Florida and New York. When updating classical material, there is a trend towards giving the adaptation a very vibrant and distinct visual work-over. Updates of Shakespeare plays are a great example. Like how Ralph Fiennes turned Coriolanus into a Hurt Locker-looking gritty wartime drama or Joss Whedon giving that indie-feel to Much Ado About Nothing. Cuaron doesn't go as far as say Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet which kept the original dialogue and over-stylized and saturated the viewer with a distinctly modern style.
Instead, Cuaron settles for an almost middle-ground. The plot is transposed and characters are slightly different (Pip is now Fin). It's more like The Lion King-Hamlet comparison. Patrick Doyle has very loud and classical musical cues that feel out of place and Emmanuel Lubezewski lights like a classical painter as many of the best of cinematographers do. It's just that Cuaron's sense of magic and wizardry that came across in even the wanderlust feeling of Y Tu Mama Tambien, is not apparent in this earlier work. Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow feel dull where their longing and lovesickness feels overly melodramatic. Anne Bancroft and Chris Cooper in supporting roles are amusing, but after a certain point the film feels lost and wandering towards its end as the screenplay by Mitch Glazer seems content with hitting the story-beats of the adaptation without ever making the moments feel three-dimensional and resonant.
Later in his career, Cuaron did find a connection to material he didn't have a hand in writing which would be Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. But that might be because in that same interview from above he states that his film prior to that, Y Tu Mama Tambien, was his rediscovery-as-a-director film- "What we talked about [with Y Tu Mama Tambien] was, let's do the film we would have done before we even went to film school. Let's start from scratch."
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