A Film Canon

This classic adaptation makes the most of its freedom from Dickens' episodic, serialistic imperative to clarify, and further beautify, his narrative and structural ingenuity - generally, in terms of the shifting relations between Pip, Magwitch, Miss Havisham and Estelle; specifically, in terms of an array of motifs and images whose figurative import is heightened by Lean's ability to switch between irrealistic and neorealistic modes. The former is particularly clear in the opening tableaux - especially the graveyard and surrounding marshes, where it corresponds to Pip's own heightened, childish imagination - while the latter tends to predominate in the third act, particularly once Magwitch makes his revelation, and so divests Pip's lifestyle of the exoticism of Miss Havisham and Estelle, replacing it with a grittiness whose stylistic corollary is a replacement of the stagebound marshes with a spectacular sequence shot on and around the mouth of the Thames. That said, this movement away from irrealism is less a matter of individual moments than of a change in mood that is foreshadowed by Lean's unwillingness, from the beginning, to partake of Dickens' sentimentality - particularly clear in the case of Miss Havisham, whose eccentricity is persistently subordinated to her cruelty, and whose house is sufficiently oppressive - rather than fascinating - to render Pip's banishment of its darkness the final, most liberating, gesture. In turn, this movement away from sentimentality is also a movement away from caricature - but perhaps a necessary one, given the extent to which the pleasure of Dickens' grotesques lies more in his extraordinary descriptions (particularly difficult to capture on film, insofar as they always gesture towards a series of qualities too intense to be fully imagined, let alone visualised) than in the characters themselves, who take on a proportionately - or at least a provisionally - humane quality here, epitomised by Lean's decision to mainly elaborate those grotesques with a professional investment in Pip.