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Director Alfonso Cuarón and screenwriter Mitch Glazer's adaptation of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow) places the novel's story of Pip's unrequited love for the beautiful Estella in a contemporary American setting. Dickens's Pip is renamed Finnegan Bell, or Finn; the sterile and decaying Satis House becomes the overgrown and unkempt (but lushly green) former plantation Paradiso Perduto; the eccentric and isolated Miss Havisham becomes the 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 the marshes of Pip's childhood into the Florida Gulf Coast and the 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, the object of male desire and of the 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 on "the scathing reviews justly accorded the film" [96]), the film also received a number of positive reviews in such major publications as the New York Times, Salon magazine, People, and Rolling Stone. I suggest that with the recent critical and commercial success of director Cuarón's YTu Mamá También (2001 ), the time has come for a reevaluation of Great Expectations, especially one that takes into account the skills and artistry of director Cuarón and his longtime collaborator, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who worked on both films. Even the initial reviews of Great Expectations note the visually appealing mise en scène created by Cuarón, Lubezki, and production designer Tony Burrough. For example, while praising the "genuine romantic spirit of the film" and the "delicate performances" of Hawke and Paltrow, Peter Travers primarily applauds the film's "ravishing color" (64). David Anson, reviewing the film for Newsweek, commends Cuarón's "sensually charged" visual sense and notes that the film was "lusciously designed" by Burrough and "beautifully shot" by Lubezki (61). In a New York Times review, Janet Maslin writes, "largely because Mr. Cuarón is such a voluptuous visual stylist, this 'Great Expectations' is capable of wonder" (10). Even a...