With a title like Great Expectations from the novel by the incomparable Charles Dickens, there are some big cinematic shoes to fill, especially since the Victorian-era classic is currently filming for a 2012 release. However, it’s just come out that the adaptation will have a new, non-Dickensian ending!
Next year will mark Dickens’ 200th birthday, and there will be celebrations all over the globe to honor the work one of the England’s most-valued writers of all time. But maybe he’s rolling over in his grave to the unsettling news that his story, easily one of the greatest novels ever written, is taking yet another questionable turn at the box office (for example, the 1998 version starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Ethan Hawke, Anne Bancroft, and Robert De Niro). That is, if Dickens would‘ve even cared for such follies as movies.
The Telegraph reveals that “screenwriter David Nicholls said the scenes in which Pip meets Miss Havisham will be ‘a bit like going to see Hannibal Lector.’ The film will be approached ‘like a thriller…’ The heartbreaker Estella will be a ‘femme fatale’ and, most contentiously, Nicholls revealed that he has ‘come up with an ending that isn’t in the book.’”
Nicholls (writer of One Day) also adds, “Dickens came up with two endings – one which is incredibly bleak and one which is unrealistically romantic and sentimental. Neither are quite satisfactory and we’ve come up with an ending that isn’t in the book – and is somewhere in between. It draws on events in the book but takes them in a slightly different direction, but is in no way sacrilegious.” We’ll see.
Director Mike Newell (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time) leads the cast which includes big names like Helena Bonham Carter (The King‘s Speech) as Miss Havisham, Ralph Fiennes (Wrath of the Titans) as Magwitch, and the young leads are Jeremy Irvine (War Horse) as protagonist Pip, and Holliday Grainger (The Borgias) as the beautiful, yet cold Estella. Other familiar names include Golden Globe winner Sally Hawkins (Jane Eyre), Jason Flemyng (Hanna), and Robbie Coltrane (Arthur Christmas).
However, on a brighter note, the above images come courtesy of Deadline, showing Carter as the troubled spinster, Miss Havisham, looking every bit loyal to Dickens’ tragic icon who was left at the altar as a young girl, carrying a torch for her long lost lover for decades.
What do you think of this change in storyline? Can the Dickens classic work with a different ending or do you think the story should be left as is?
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