Steven Knight is one of those television authors whose previous merits and successes have ensured that he can do whatever he wants in the near future. Knight secured a blank check and a blank sheet of paper with future wishes and plans with the “Peaky Blinders” series, and even though this British man has been writing scripts for TV and movies (Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises, Amazing Grace) since the nineties, his ax is in the honey. fell only with the series about the family of criminals from Birmingham. Only since then has Knight produced films and series, the quality of which varies, but the man has a lot of work to do, and for the BBC he decided to make a screen adaptation of Charles Dickens’ famous novel “Great Expectations”.
There is almost no novel by Dickens that has not already been adapted into dozens of screen adaptations, and his 13th work, completed in 1861, is no exception. Dickens’ novels offer perhaps the best window into the world of England and London in the middle of the 19th century, during the Victorian era, and usually he dealt with the fates of people from the bottom of society who came into a situation where they came into contact with the aristocracy and the upper class of civil society at least marginally. . Just like other famous Dickens heroes like Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, the main character of “Great Expectations” Philip Pip Pirrip is a boy / young man of humble origin.
However, he will have the opportunity to enter the high society of London and will have the chance to become a real English gentleman from an orphan and a blacksmith’s assistant. I already wrote about the content accompanying Dikcen’s original material when reviewing David Lean’s version of the film from 1946, and Knight’s mini-series was cut in the bud by critics, and especially by the audience, as soon as it appeared. One of the reasons for such bad reviews and ratings (a miserable 4.9 on IMDB as I write this) is the decision to opt for the so-called colorblind casting, that is, to assign some of the roles that in the book from the middle of the 19th century, quite logically, were all white, to some actors with darker skin tones.
Thus, in Knight’s version, the fatal Estella performed by the English-Australian actress of Mauritanian – Thai origin Shalom Brune – Franklin, as well as the manipulative lawyer Jaggers performed by Ashley Thomas, are black. And some of the secondary, less important characters are black or Indian, and this, as in the case of the recent Amazon series “The Lord of the Rings”, caused numerous controversies. Well, even though the critics completely cut down Knight’s version of the famous British classic, it wasn’t so bad at all, especially since his version is even darker than the original, and he started with a slightly modernist approach.
It’s shot on a camera with slightly greyish-bluish filters in the wake of “Ozarka,” and Knight’s “Great Expectations” has a bit of a gothic feel to it, especially when Olivia Colman’s old Miss Havisham shows up in her old, creaky, dusty castle. Dickens has always been a genius to me because he masterfully subverted the British society of that time, that vanity fair, the class system of his time, and here he also tackled the subversion of the Gentleman concept. So Pip (as a young man played by Fionn Whitehead), a talented and ambitious boy, will get the opportunity to be educated by the rich and grotesque widow Havisham, and helping the prisoner Magwich will turn out to be a decision that will change his life. Very soon Pip will become a toy in the hands of unscrupulous and evil people, and his ambition to become a gentleman and make his way into high London society will prove to be almost fatal.
Dickens also portrays London in his work as a breeding ground of corruption, greed and evil, and Knight further enhances this, but also subverts the whole story a bit and brings it from today’s, post-colonial perspective and distance when we realize that these people were really the root of all the evil of that time . A young, naive and ambitious kid like Pip will get completely lost in that game, and the words of one of the characters that too much London can suffocate a man will prove prophetic in Pip’s case. It seems even more grotesque and caricatured in Knight than in the original, especially in the case of the old and slimy Miss Havisham, played by the standard excellent Olivia Colman. Although it is said that we would have survived without who knows what order of screen adaptations of the Dickens classic, it was not at all as bad as some try to make it out to be.