Until his productivity kind of dwindled away there -- how else to describe just a single feature film in a ten-year period? -- Alfonso Cuaron was just about my gold standard for visionary directors who take big swings, and almost always hit.
Children of Men is, of course, the gold standard of that gold standard, having taken my #1 movie of 2006 and, perhaps more tellingly, my #2 movie of that entire decade.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner Azkaban, Y Tu Mama Tambien and Gravity are all excellent movies, and even when I'm not totally sold on something Cuaron makes -- such as the only movie we've gotten from him since 2013, Roma -- I recognize its artistry, and probably think it's a "me thing" and that I should take another look.
I went back this month for another look at his 1998 film, Great Expectations, even though I never thought not liking it was a "me thing." (And to clarify more fully, I think Roma is a very good movie, I just don't think it quite warranted all the praise it got.)
I'm pretty sure I saw Great Expectations before I saw Y Tu Mama Tambien in Cuaron's filmography, but it would be hard to confirm that because I didn't keep track of the order in which I watched films until early 2002, the year after Y Tu Mama came out. And I definitely don't remember watching it as a result of loving Y Tu Mama, though I suppose that could have happened. So let's just say Great Expectations was my first introduction to Cuaron.
If so, it didn't leave me with very great expectations.
Now I should say it's possible I wouldn't particularly care for any film version of Charles Dickens' novel, which I haven't read, and which I have never seen adapted into a period appropriate film. This rewatch confirms that this story is not of particular interest to me, even though I consider myself a romantic who is ready and eager to swoon over such material, if it is presented just so.
In fact, I couldn't help but think of Titanic, which came out the year before Great Expectations, as I watched this. I went in hook, line and sinker for Titanic -- if you'll allow the marine metaphor -- so you'd think that would leave me particularly susceptible to the way Cuaron et al try to conjure a similarly intoxicating romance between Ethan Hawke's Finn and Gwyneth Paltrow's Stella. I'm sure this is straight from the novel so I'm not trying to accuse Cuaron of ripping Titanic off, but there's even a scene where the young man draws/paints the young woman in the nude.
Suffice it to say I was not intoxicated.
And there are materials here with which to intoxicate a person. Specifically, Paltrow. I'll confess that Gwyneth Paltrow of this period does make me swoon just a bit with that perfectly coquettish partial parting of her lips. Both the actress and the character are keenly aware of the power they may have over men, and use it mercilessly.
The problem is, I don't feel any energy between her and Hawke, an actor I have always liked very much, but perhaps slightly more so in the 21st century than the 20th. I feel there is a lot of play-acting of an almost fairytale style romance, what with the mouldering Florida mansion where the young versions of the characters first meet and share that ten-year-old kiss at the fountain they are both drinking from -- a moment I do admit works, and that I remembered well from my previous viewing. I just don't feel like the film gets beyond play-acting.
I suppose this is a logical progression for Cuaron after his debut English language feature, 1995's A Little Princess, which is one of those movies I went back and watched after I'd already been floored by his work. I really liked that one and it does indicate the sort of fantasy world where Cuaron finds himself in Great Expectations. (I should note here that I thought myself a Cuaron completist, but it turns out I haven't seen 1991's Love in the Time of Hysteria, a Spanish language film, so I probably ought to rectify that at some point.)
But I think it's pretty telling how Cuaron thought Great Expectations went that he immediately scrambled back to something smaller and more culturally specific to his experiences, with a cast of no-names, two of whom went on to become big stars. Y Tu Mama Tambien feels like a reaction to having "sold out" to make a big movie starring big movie stars and not having it go well, and I think we can say pretty definitively that it enabled him to have this legendary career.
So what's actually wrong with Great Expectations?
It's hard to encapsulate it through concrete examples. It just doesn't feel very true. As I was watching it Wednesday night, I was initially critical of how I didn't think it was very visually inventive, even with long-time collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki serving as the DP. But I did notice, as the movie went on, things that I thought were at least attempts by Cuaron to showcase that sort of creativity. They just lack impact.
One thing I felt is that it hasn't aged very well, or probably more accurately, it was not made at the time with an eye for how it would age. A moment that particularly stood out to me is that an early romantic scene between our leads, which is meant to take place in the late 1980s, is scored to a Soundgarden song. Chris Cornell's voice feels like it situates this very exactly in the early 1990s, which is neither the era that is being depicted in this movie -- there was definitely no grunge before 1991 -- nor the era that the film was actually made, when grunge was already on its way out. (Not all the music had this effect on me, as I was pleased to hear the voice of personal favorite Tori Amos at one point, in a song I didn't previously know -- though I think her music transcends the specific period of its creation a lot more than Cornell's does.)
To show you how little I remembered the details of this movie, I was surprised to see Robert De Niro's role as the criminal Finn helps escape, back when he's still a child, who is ultimately revealed to be his benefactor. I sort of remembered it as I saw it happening, but if you had asked me beforehand if Robert De Niro was in this movie, I would have told you surely not.
Without a real acquaintance with the original novel, I couldn't get a grasp on what themes were meant to be explored here, specifically through that character but just generally. What is it supposed to mean that Finn saved this gruff character -- albeit very much against his will -- from certain capture by the police, and that this man secretly funded his rise in the art world over the next 20 years? Is that supposed to mean Finn didn't really make it on his own? And is this supposed to be a defeat for the character? If that's the idea, it isn't explored very conclusively.
Rather, it seems that what this movie is really "about" is that Finn falls in love with a coquettish woman who parts her lips just so, and she basically toys with his emotions, and that's mean. The false way these characters have been developed really reveals itself in a scene after a big art opening Finn has in New York, where he's swigging a bottle of booze and walking through the rain to (what he believes is) Estella's apartment. He then shouts up at her window about how he has attained fame and fortune and success in the art world and it's still not enough for her. The fact that this moment feels so abrupt within the narrative is a sure sign that the proper work hasn't been done. Why is he so mad? Is it such an epic betrayal to tease someone?
Then when he realizes it's not Estella obscured up in that window, but rather, the eccentric old woman who owned the mouldering Florida mansion -- Mrs. Dinsmoor, played by Anne Bancroft -- he has to have it out with her as though she bears a significant responsibility for Estella breaking his heart. It's not at all convincing that this might be the case -- she even told him the girl would break his heart, many years ago -- and yet the scene culminates in tortured grandeur as Dinsmoor cries in agony "What have I done???" while Finn storms down the stairs and out of the building.
I think in the end I have to say that this is like the Calvin Klein jeans ad version of Great Expectations. There's a lot of shots of people looking sort of pretty and sort of tortured and generally dressed in dynamite clothing. There's scenes of wild rain and leaves blowing around as if staged by a set designer. And then of course there is the grand mansion, overgrown with ivy and other plant life, sort of like Gatsby's mansion if it had been left to seed.
In fact, the evocation of Gatsby got me thinking about what Baz Luhrmann would have done with this material. Not only would he have made it grander by making it more of an obvious caricature, by outsizing its romance until it blew off the canvas entirely, but he would have made it fun. There isn't a single thing fun about Great Expectations, and that could be why it's so hard to care about any of its characters.
I wouldn't say that a sense of humor ever became Cuaron's strong suit. But he didn't need one in the movies he would make later. (And you're wrong if you think Children of Men doesn't have any funny moments.) All he needed was the vision he found along the way, which may not conform to the sorts of commonalities between works we ascribe to an auteur, but was consistently characterized by being ambitious -- ambitious in a way that failed him in Great Expectations.
But we should also be incredibly thankful for Great Expectations.
Let's say his vision for this movie had been very well received, had even resulted in Oscar nominations -- hell, for the sake of argument, let's even say it won best picture. Those things happen and there's almost a zero percent chance we get Y Tu Mama Tambien, or the best Harry Potter movie, or the craziest post-apocalyptic movie about mass sterility that contains some of the most technically challenging scenes ever filmed, or an absolute game-changer in the making of outer space films.
And how much poorer would we be for that.
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