LONDON CITY NIGHTS: Jeremy Irvine

Thursday, December 25, 2014

'The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death' (2015) directed by Tom Harper

Thursday, December 25, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

In this review I will attempt to give you a rough simulation of just how annoying The Woman in Black 2 is. Please turn the volume on your computer up to get the full experience.

The Woman in Black 2 is an impossibly naff, deeply dull horror film in which everyone involved puts in the bare minimum effort to collect a paycheque. After the well-regarded The Woman in Black made fistfuls of money for the resurrected Hammer brand, I suppose a sequel was an inevitability. A cash-in squirted into the dead zone of January cinema doesn't inspire the highest cinematic hopes, but you never know, the series' loose mythology might allow some hungry young director to make a name for himself.

No such luck. In this sequel, the time frame has moved on from Edwardian up to World War II. Our heroine is Eve Parkins (Phoebe Fox), a kindly, sensitive young woman charged with the safety of a group of young evacuaees. With the Blitz in full swing it's too dangerous for them to stay in London. So the powers that be decide that the safest place to send these already traumatised children is Eel Marsh House, a dilapidated, mouldy ruin jampacked with hella creepy things in the middle of a tidal bog that's constantly wreathed with spooky fog. Fair enough.

Yeah this place seems legit.

The previous inhabitant apparently had an fetish for eyeless china dolls, stern-looking paintings and broken children's toys. There's even a mysteriously locked room that “nobody goes in”. Naturally there's also a angry ghost hiding out, whose supernatural powers appear to consist of primarily of screeching. As the plot trundles along a crappy love story also springs up between our heroine and Harry Burnstow (Jeremy Irvine), a hunky yet tortured pilot who's stationed nearby.

The basic ingredients of The Woman in Black 2 (angry ghost, good-hearted heroine, mysterious house, creepy kids) are about as familiar as you're likely to get in fiction. But that doesn't mean you can't slot them together into fascinating new configurations. Unfortunately The Woman in Black 2 does nothing fascinating, or even mildly interesting, settling for a mummified plot whose developments you can see coming a mile off.

Worse, it's not scary. Don't get me wrong, you'll jump, but that's only because Tom Harper has decided to construct the film entirely around jump scares. The thunking rhythm of the film basically goes like this. Quiet bit... quiet bit... really quiet bit... *SCREEEEEAM!* Rinse and repeat that every 10 minutes and after 90 minutes you've apparently got yourself a horror flick. The law of diminishing returns soon comes into effect. The first jump scare jolts you out of your seat, but by the ninth you couldn't give less of a shit.

Horror isn't often Oscar-bait, but there's a rigorous cinematic art in scaring the crap out of an audience, an art The Woman in Black 2 blithely ignores. A good horror film should inspire some kind of existential dread. The best horror directors realise this, mixing up a cocktail of fear from slow-burning ambience, exploiting common psychological worries, using subtly disorientating cinematography and, most of all, creating sympathetic characters

But Tom Harper is a one trick pony, his relentless hammering on the quiet bit/loud noise dynamic is annoying rather than scary. Sure you can scare audiences like this, but it's baby's first horror technique. By the time the credits roll The Woman in Black 2 has more in common with crappy YouTube scare memes than it does with its genre classics like The Shining, Repulsion or even The Bababook.

Spooky things should probably avoid cosy cardigans

None of this is helped by performances that, at best, border on acceptable. The only person to come out of this relatively unscathed is Phoebe Fox. She plays her role with the steely determination of someone that's sure that buried somewhere in this dog of a script must lie something, anything dramatically worthwhile to latch onto. She's wrong, but at least she's trying.

Then again, perhaps Jeremy Irvine is also trying his best, though that is a low bar to clear. Irvine is one of the few actors whose mere presence in a movie outright dismays me. There's something insincere behind those wooden eyes, as if he's some kind of Patrick Bateman-esque robot calculating the best way to appear human. If The Woman in Black 2 can be said to have any worth, it's that Irvine's presence in a low-rent horror sequel may mark the beginning of a long downward spiral for him, hopefully meaning I'll soon never have to deal with him again.

If you've been following along with the multimedia aspects of this review you'll likely be deeply annoyed. This annoyance is but a fraction of what you'd feel if you went to see The Woman in Black 2. If Hammer continue sending rubbish like this into cinemas their resurrection will prove to be all too brief.

★

The Woman in Black 2 is released January 1st.

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

'The Railway Man' (2013) directed by Jonathan Teplitzky

Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

The Railway Man is a handsomely decked out film. Telling an inspirational true story of triumph over hatred in a particularly dark moment of the 20th century, complete with CG vistas of wars, a swooping score, great location shooting and populated by the cream of modern acting; Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, Stellan Skarsgård. Why don't they just start handing it the awards right now? I mean, come on people, what more do you want? Blood?!

Maybe it is blood I'm after because despite all the finery there's something missing from the heart of The Railway Man; a film that for all its ambitions towards humanist didacticism; all the brainpower it devotes to untangling what drives anger, hatred and cruelty; all the myriad ways it tries to find beauty and humour within darkest horror; despite all that it comes up short.

The film works with a split narrative, the primary story taking place in December 1980 and the second (told in flashback) in a Japanese Army work camp in Thailand during the Second World War. Both stories follow Eric Lomax; bright, young and optimistic in the past (Jeremy Irvine) and traumatised and miserable in 1980 (Colin Firth). As we open the film he meets the lovely Patricia (Nicole Kidman) on board a train and quickly the two fall in love and get married. But hiding just underneath Lomax's calm, bookish and pleasant exterior is a twisted up ball of psychological scar tissue. He writhes and screams in his nightmares, falls into violent rages and retreats into mild catatonia.

Something needs to be done. Popping her detective cap on Patricia heads to the servicemen's club to find out what the hell is so terrifying about his past. She meets Finlay (Stellan Skarsgård), who served with Lomax. He reluctantly narrates a flashback to 1942, explaining how the British services surrendered in Singapore and how the soldiers were pressganged into constructing the Burma-Siam Railway or, as it's colloquially known, The Death Railway. It lives up to its name, the construction process transforming plucky young Brits into filth-encrusted, barely conscious zombies - all under the sadistic cosh of Imperial Japanese Army.

Despite this promising material - albeit material that's been mined perfectly in David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai - for most of its runtime The Railway Man is a bit dull. The 1980s scenes reiterate the same problems repeatedly, taking an absolute age to get to the meat of the story, while the wartime scenes suffer from a rather off-putting digital sheen. Though these characters are living in filth they look like male models walking around in front of some slightly unconvincing CG backgrounds.

I was primed and ready for Teplitzky to land some knockout emotional punches, but they never came. Despite charming 'meet cute' opening sequences we never quite connect with Firth's Lomax character, partially because he looks way too young to have served in World War II and partly because his sudden u-turn from bashful Hugh Granty train-geek to Stanley Knife wielding nutter is totally out of the blue. I think they're trying impress upon us how shocking this transformation is for Kidman's Patricia, but in alienating her they alienate us too.

As the younger Lomax Jeremy Irvine is probably better than I've ever seen him. He goes for the torture scenes with the appropriate gusto, playing the character with a Christlike nobility and willingness to sacrifice himself for his brothers-in-arms. In a somewhat odd development, Irvine often appears to be trying for a Colin Firth impression - duplicating his tics and stammers. It's a neat acting trick but within the narrative it means Lomax is doing an impression of his future self, which doesn't make a huge amount of sense.

After a bunch of meandering bullshit and endless shots of a miserable Colin Firth staring disconsolately out to sea, it's a relief when (halfway through the movie) the actual plot kicks in. We discover that Firth's torturer, Nagase (Hiroyuki Sanada) is not only still alive, but actually working as a tour guide in the decaying ruins of the prison camp he was a guard at. Finally the Lomax has a motivation other than moping, and so the film takes a sharply compelling upturn as Lomax sets out confronts the man who broke his body and messed up his brain.

This confrontation is the key scene, watching Nagase and Lomax verbally bouncing off one other over a table in a grotty old torture room is fascinating. There's a neat switcharound in roles, Lomax sociopathically relishing giving Nagase a taste of what it's like to be tortured rather than to dish it out. It's here that The Railway Man finally comes close to achieving what it's trying to set out to do, the scenes of Firth remembering his waterboarding achieve a painful visceral quality now that we have a unity of place between wartime and 1980.

In graphically showing waterboarding as the most traumatic of tortures suffered by Lomax, Teplitzky draws inescapable connections to modern Western torture techniques. Here, with a public schoolboy, shorts-wearing British soldier undergoing the torture things become a little hazier. On some level, Lomax ends up as a representation of the detainees abused by his modern squaddie equivalents in black sites. There's a subtle shock in realising just how monstrously 'our boys' behave, the film finding a way of allowing us to vicariously experience outrage in seeing the shoe on the other foot.

That's all well and good, but central to The Railway Man is the commendably Christian desire to forgive those that have trespassed against you. So if Lomax is an avatar of those Western governments have tortured, then the film becomes a plea for our own forgiveness - the lesson of the film aimed at those we've wronged - imploring torture victims to turn the other cheek and embrace us in the spirit of forgiveness. The assumption that contrite acceptance of atrocities inflicted upon you is the most moral course of action feels condescendingly paternalistic.

The Railway Man isn't quite as good as a film as it clearly wants to be. It's competently put together, but contains not a stitch of visual virtuosity, is soundtracked in the exact way you'd expect a film like this to be (i.e. boringly) and the script has more than its fair share of clunky dialogue. That said there's a steady uptick in interest as the film approaches its end and the final lesson in how to deal with those who've wronged you is commendable - if only on a surface level.

★★★

The Railway Man is on general release from January 10th.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

'Now is Good' (2012) directed by Ol Parker, 17th September 2012

Tuesday, September 18, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

‘Now is Good’ is a film about a teenage girl battling leukaemia. By the halfway point I was rooting for the leukaemia. It’s a tragedy, but not because it’s about a dying girl, but because it fritters away a great concept and two good performances. Seeing a bad film is one thing, but seeing a bad film that could quite easily have been something special is far more depressing.

Dakota Fanning plays Tessa, a 16 year old English girl slowly succumbing to leukaemia. The film begins after she’s stopped her chemotherapy; she’s decided she’s going to let the disease run its course - a decision that will inevitably result in her death. To make the most of the time she has left, she writes a list of things she wants to do before she dies. Appropriately enough for a teenager, these are goals like “take illegal drugs”, “break the law” and “have sex”. One thing not on the list is “fall in love”. But hello, who’s this boy that’s just moved in next door? Why, it’s superhunk Jeremy Irvine! The two fall in love, but how can they make the relationship work when Tessa’s death seems ever more imminent?

Dakota Fanning as Tessa and Paddy Considine as "Father" (that's how he's credited)

In supporting roles as Tessa’s divorced parents are Paddy Considine and Olivia Williams. They’re the complete opposite of each other, almost to an unbelievable degree. Considine is devoting his entire waking life to Tessa’s treatment, agonising over her illness and clutching at whatever straws he can. Williams on the other hand is very much a ‘hands off’ parent, being late for medical conferences, and not showing any interest in the particulars of her daughter’s condition. Rounding off the family is Tessa’s younger brother, Cal as played by Edgar Canham.

One of the reasons that this film is so disappointing is also one of the jewels in its crown. Dakota Fanning’s performance as Tessa is pretty damn great. She captures the character’s steely determination and acceptance of her condition while also looking more and more physically vulnerable as the cancer progresses (she looks a bit like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby sometimes). Her appearance grows more pale and haggard over time, but she always has a fire burning within her. Fanning has piercing bright blue eyes, and with her marble white skin and short, cropped light hair they seem to project from her head like laser beams.

Throughout the film she takes pains to conceal her illness from people she meets. Tessa desperately doesn’t want people to view her as a sick person to be lavished with sympathy. But Tessa is extremely fragile, fainting on occasion, bruised, pockmarked with catheter holes and suffering violent nosebleeds. This fragility is highlighted by her pale complexion, the effect being that she looks as if she’s made of porcelain. Tessa is never less than interesting to watch, and Fanning doesn’t shy away from exposing her flaws. In addition, Fanning’s English accent is pretty impressive stuff for a young American actor, and doesn’t lapse into caricature.

Dakota Fanning as Tessa

So with such a compelling central performance, how can this be a bad film? Because (with the exception of Paddy Considine) everything else here is utterly dreadful on both an artistic and technical level.

This film contains some truly awful performances; there are characters here that have the same effect on me as running nails down a blackboard. In a way it’s quite impressively economical, there are characters in this film that only get a few lines, but I found myself whispering “dear god, no…” when they turn up on screen.

The primary acting problem with the film is Jeremy Irvine, who once again is completely miscast. I've developed an instinctive dislike of this man – he radiates a smug self satisfaction every wooden moment he’s on screen. Irvine literally plays the boy next door, the one person sensitive enough to love Tessa for who she really is, rather than feeling sorry for her because of her disease. His backstory is that his father died in a car crash, and as a result he’s apparently emotionally crippled and won’t open up to anyone. The problem with this is that if there’s one thing that Irvine clearly isn’t, it’s emotionally crippled. There are emotional notes to hit later on in the film which he completely flubs, something made all too obvious by the fine job that Fanning’s doing opposite him. Physically he just doesn’t work as a ‘boy next door’ either, standing out as far, far too handsome in what is generally a down to earth film.

That tree isn't the only wooden thing in this picture...

His presence in the film comes close to derailing it completely. Prior to his entrance things are quite interesting, the character of Fanning is proactive and seemingly in control of her life. But whenever Irvine’s character is onscreen, things devolve into a sludgy morass of romantic clichés. Pretty much every other character in this film has obvious character flaws, but Irvine doesn’t. He’s written as having a flaw: after his father’s death he’s afraid to emotionally connect with someone for fear of losing them. This never translates to the performance, and in effect Irvine puts on the same monotone ‘nice-guy’ act throughout the entirety of the film.

While Irvine is undoubtedly awful, perhaps this is magnified by us spending so much time with him. The bit characters with only a few lines on the other hand, manage to make us despise them with venom even with the few minutes they’re on screen. The primary offender in this is Edgar Canham as Tessa’s little brother. It seems unfair to criticise a child actor, but my god he is awful. He over enunciates every single unfunny line he gets in exactly the same way. Similarly flat and uninspired are pretty much all of the extended cast, even Olivia Williams never rises above mediocrity. A cast being this consistently terrible seems unlikely to be the fault of these actors, blame here must lie with the director, Ol Parker.

Kaya Scodelario as Zoey and Jeremy Irvine as Adam

As you’ll see below, I don’t think particularly highly of the choices that Parker made in directing this film, but there are some good sequences. In particular, the nosebleed sequence is appropriately shocking, well edited and excellently acted. In some ways, it’s more annoying having one great sequence in an otherwise pedestrian film, as it proves the director has talent, something that makes it all the more mysterious when damn near everything else is completely fumbled.

Parker frequently makes bizarre, amateurish directorial mistakes, both in tone and in various technical aspects. The performances of everyone except Fanning and Considine have the feel of first-takes. Dialogue frequently seems stilted, timing seems off, as if people are reading their lines from off-camera. It’s a distancing effect, the exact thing you don’t want to happen in what should be an intimate, emotional drama powered by relatable characters.

These bizarre mistakes in tone also serve to derail our empathy. One of Tessa’s goals is to break the law before she dies. She decides to do this by stealing a guys bank card while he’s distracted at a cashpoint. While Tessa is an explicitly flawed character, her preying on innocent bystanders seems a step too far. This film can only work if we’re on Tessa’s side throughout, and her actions here seem a bit petty and cruel. It’s hard not to shift our sympathies to the hapless nobody they rob, who chases them through the shopping centre to a terrible cover of ‘I Fought the Law’. Soon after we see her engage in some shoplifting, which is far easier to frame as a victimless crime. Why not just use that as her example of breaking the law?

Another moment in which the film goes awry is a bizarrely shoehorned in anti-abortion subplot. Tessa’s friend Zoey has gotten pregnant by mistake, and Tessa accompanies her to the abortion clinic. Through a bit of weird emotional blackmailing, Tessa convinces her to keep the baby, with a line like “you wouldn’t have brought me here if you wanted to get rid of it”. Now, I think I can see what the film is trying to do here. It’s demonstrating how much Tessa appreciates life by showing how much she values Zoey’s unborn child. But it’s plain to see that her friend is totally unready to become a parent, she’s 17 at most, single and her character is repeatedly defined as irresponsible and shortsighted. As such, this subplot ends up feeling vaguely condemnatory of women that choose to go through with abortions – and feels utterly out of place.

There are also some frankly amateurish lighting and production errors too. The fact that I even noticed the lighting at all is probably a criticism of the film in itself. Surely a film with a gripping enough story would mean the way things are lit is the furthest thing from my mind? But then you see scenes taking place on beaches in the middle of the night where the characters are essentially standing in a floodlight. Similarly, there are scenes set on streets at night where we see Tessa and Adam walking down the street from a high crane shot. The street stretches off behind them, darkly illuminated by the orange streetlights, but the section the characters are walking in is lit up from all sides by super bright floodlights. There’s a clear delineation between where the lighting starts, and where it stops. In later night scenes someone seems to have taken the trouble to put lights in very strange places, like tucked behind a phonebox, illuminating it from behind. The effect is that the film begins to feel very artificial, which again detracts from the central drama.

Paddy Considine turns in a fine performance. Nothing wrong here.

Another production aspect that stood out was a snowy scene late in the film. Obviously, it’s not practical to wait for it to snow for real, so artificial snow is used. One of the important rules in working with artificial snow like this is that under no account do you show it in closeup. It looks perfectly natural even from a slight distance, but Parker repeatedly gives us full screen closeups and we see what looks like blobs of cotton wool landing on our leads. What rubs salt into the wound is when Adam lies down and makes a snow angel. Fake snow just doesn’t move like the real thing. This might seem like petty criticism but all of these mistakes add up. If an audience perceives the film as overtly stagey and artificial, even subconsciously, it becomes more difficult to emotionally connect with what’s going on. And in a film like this that connection is the most important thing to maintain.

All of these flaws, coupled with stuff like an overly melodramatic score (they may as well have flashed up “THIS IS THE SAD BIT”), clichéd dialogue and occasionally poor soundtrack choice hurt the movie. It’s death by a thousand cuts, and by the final scenes the film is lumbering along desperately trying to get by on pathos alone.

Olivia Williams as "Mother"

Most of the reasons the film fails seem easily correctable. A little more care in casting, more attention paid to directing the actors, maybe a bit of logical thinking applied to set design and lighting and the film would be drastically improved. It’s frustrating because the central conceit, that of a teenage girl fighting against preconceived notions of what a cancer patient and and can't do has legs. If the film had more of a focus on her list of things to do before she dies, rather than using it as a framework to bolt a sappy love story onto it’d be a far better film. As it stands it’s a wasted opportunity, and worse, one which wastes a fine central performance from Fanning. It’s a testament to how much this film fails that even with such a good piece of acting at its centre, we find ourselves secretly wishing this leukaemia would hurry it up already so we don’t have to sit through anymore of this drivel.

If you want a good cancer film, check out 50/50.

‘Now is Good’ is on general release from 19th September 2012

Monday, September 10, 2012

'Great Expectations' (2012) directed by Mike Newell

Monday, September 10, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

This is the second adaptation of 'Great Expectations' produced by the BBC within the space of a year. The first, Sarah Phelp's lavish and well-received three part television adaptation was shown over Christmas 2011. This version is to be released in the run up to Christmas 2012, and features a similarly star-studded cast of British acting stalwarts.

Newell plays it safe with the material, sticking with the early C19th setting, and aside from cutting a number of subplots for time, sticks pretty closely to Dickens' text. His casting also throws ups few surprises. Helena Bonham-Carter as Miss Havisham almost feels too obvious, and without wishing to detract from the excellent performances of much of this experienced cast, frankly, these feel like roles they could play in their sleep. So why produce this now? Why are people attracted to 'Great Expectations'?

Jeremy Irving as the adult Pip

'Great Expectations' is a story of class. A tale of a young man thrust upwards to the top rung of polite society, and the effects this change has on him. Examining class in the modern day feels very timely. For the last 30-odd years, politicians have been drumming into us the notion that 'class is dead' or that "we are all middle class now". Following the introduction of austerity following the financial crash of 2008, this notion has been exposed as a lie and increasingly the concept of class has gained currency in contemporary discourse. When confronted by an aristocratic, public school educated and fantastically personally wealthy government telling us "we're all in this together" it's hard not to feel the line in the sand between "us" and "them" become ever more tangible. This is exacerbated by those at the desperate end of the economic spectrum, who are dependant on government welfare to eke out an acceptable standard of living being demonised by press and politicians alike as 'scroungers'.

Is it any wonder that the work of Dickens has re-entered the spotlight in his centenary year? We live in a culture where those that seek work can be compelled to sleep under a bridge in central London to provide unpaid security services to the elderly, stone-faced monarch as she floats down the drizzly river Thames in her fabulous golden barge? Hogarth couldn't have sketched a neater satire.

Newell takes care to highlight the immense financial and social divide between the haves and have nots in Dickens' world. The change in scenery between Pip's simple country home in the marshes and his new life in the city couldn't be greater. Almost as soon as he is newly minted as a gentleman, Pip is enrolled in the 'Finches of the Grove', a men's club for young, fashionable men whose only desire seems to be to spend money extravagantly. Newell does a great job of very quickly defining them as repellent, particularly in the utterly venal character of Bentley Drummle (Ben Lloyd-Hughes). We watch them down their drinks and as one hurl their crystal glasses into the fireplace. It's imagery and behaviour that seems directly reminiscent of David Cameron and Boris Johnson's violent and humiliating destruction of restaurants as part of the 'jaunts' of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford , and the Finches later arrogant behaviour at a dance cements the connection.

Helena Bonham-Carter as Miss Havisham

Conversely, every time we cut back to Pip's simple country home in the marshes Newell takes care to frame a gently swinging gibbet next to the roadside. A symbol of the constraints of this Victorian working class? Class mobility for these rural characters is a fantasy. Yet the working class characters are easily the most human and likeable people in the film. In particular, Pip's brother-in-law, Joe Gargary (Joe Flemyng) is consistently painted as content with his lot and with a strong moral centre. He seems to take a rugged pride in his blacksmithing, and Newell repeatedly frames his hammer striking glowing metal in closeup whenever we see him at work.

Pip never completely fits into upper-class society, and the camera usually finds him brooding in the corner, only interacting with the wider mob when it concerns the love of his life, Estella Havisham. He's a man caught between opposing worlds, of neither one nor the other. One of the most effective scenes in this adaptation is when Joe has unexpectedly arrived to visit Pip, who is by now firmly wrapped up the concept of himself as a gentleman. Pip, clearly mortified at his unexpected presence nonetheless takes him out to a chop house for dinner. While there he manages to comprehensively insult and belittle him with a snob's arrogance and lack of empathy. He unsubtly and repeatedly instructs him in 'London etiquette' explaining that his nose should never touch the rim of a wine glass, and how to hold his knife and fork. This transformation of Pip stands in sharp contrast to the relaxed young boy we saw at the start of the film, and also seems decidedly two-faced as just a few scenes before we were shown Pip's friend Herbert instructing Pip in table manners in much the same way.

What Newell wants us to see are the ways Pip is corrupted and debased by his fortune. The more he fits into high-class society, the less we like him. Those who are wealthy in 'Great Expectations' are consistently those with psychological or social maladjustments. Miss Havisham lives in an opulent yet rotting manor, a dramatic externalisation of her internal misery. Estella, tragically, cannot escape from what she has been brought up to be, a heartless destroyer of men. Bentley Drummle, 'the richest young man in England' is cruel and abusive toward those he sees as below him (so basically everyone). The more Pip becomes absorbed into this world, the more he becomes egotistical and corrupt.

Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch

To modern audiences this is catnip. Much like Dickens' Victorian audience, notions of class mobility are steadily shrinking. A generation of school-leavers look at the mountain of debt that faces them if they want further education and coupled with the employment prospects of recent graduates, they think "nuts to that". There's an affluent class in society that has pulled the ladder up after themselves, and the divide between us and them is growing by the day. Seeing them allegorically portrayed as a shower of miserable, unhappy bastards is quite soothing, as is the notion that those that do join them inevitably become similarly corrupted.

Pip's own class consciousness only genuinely matures when he realises the nature of his benefactor: the violent criminal Magwitch (Ralph Fiennes). The fact that he, of all people is the source of all of his airs and graces seems to shock some sense into him, and sets in motion some growth of conscience in Pip. There is a great scene here when Pip offers Magwitch some money to try and get him to leave. The money is unceremoniously burnt by Magwitch, a great bit of visual imagery which sums up much of his philosophy in a simple gesture. Pip does eventually learn to care about Magwitch's fate, putting his own life at considerable risk in an effort to save him, and remaining close to him until his death, even knowing that he will no longer receive any of his money.

Newell has made a film that clearly shows us the problems and effects of class stratification and the corrupting influence of money and power upon people. Pip never quite reaches the logical end of his moral lesson. Admittedly he gains a strong moral centre, but there is no real 'eureka' moment where he puts it all together and realises he can apply his experiences with class in a wider social context.

An examination of class politics like this cannot help but feel relevant to modern audiences. This portrayal of a strongly stratified class-based society, where the doors are closed to those without either breeding or fantastic luck should strike us as something to be condemned, and this film underlines faults in our disturbingly similar modern society.

In terms of the adaptations merits as a film, it succeeds more than it fails, although there are some notable missteps along the way. Pip is played as a boy and adult by brothers Toby and Jeremy Irvine respectively, but it is Toby Irvine's performance of the young Pip that anchors the role. When we skip forward in time it's a shock to see the chiseled, male model looks of his older brother Jeremy. In a Dickensian world populated by grotesques he stands out as being too pretty, as if he has stepped off the front of a Mills & Boon romance. Other characters seem to emerge organically from the muddy world that Newell creates, but Irvine seems set apart from his surroundings and is overly detached.

Pip and Estella (Holliday Grainger)

This is also a problem with Holliday Grainger's Estella. Estella is a character who repeatedly explains that she has no heart, and therefore does not feel emotion. I've always been of the opinion that the more a person professes something about themselves, the more suspicious you should be of them. But Grainger's Estella genuinely seems to be a quasi-robotic creature. When she explains that she has no heart to Pip, I was bizarrely reminded of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator II trying to learn how to emote. The essential tragedy of the character has always been not that she can't feel emotion, but that she is trapped in the pretence that she can't. But Grainger plays her like Miss Havisham has literally succeeded in constructing a wind-up doll to pour her loathing of men into. Of all the adaptations I've seen of Great Expectations, this is the least loveable Estella, and it makes Pip's continued pursual of her a bit strange. At no point do we see a real glimpse of the woman that could be freed from this icy carapace, and it is seeing this crack in the facade that should drive Pip in his passion.

Conversely, Olly Alexander's Herbert Pocket is a joy to watch. He hovers and dances around the more reserved Pip character, and Alexander conveys his essential good-heartedness and enthusiasm extremely well. He brightens up any scene he's in, and is almost impossible to dislike. The film's stable of British character actors: Ralph Fiennes, Robbie Coltrane, Ewen Bremner, Jason Flemyng and Helena Bonham-Carter all acquit themselves extremely well, but then you'd expect such a storied and experienced group of British actors to take to a Dickens adaptation like a duck to water. I did particularly enjoy Robbie Coltrane though, who physically seems more appropriate than most to be an inhabitant of Dickensian London.

One aspect I enjoyed was Newell's portrayal of early C19th London. As Pip arrives, men are shovelling crates of guts around the muddy city, jamming pig's heads onto spikes and emptying buckets of shit into the mud. It's a great introduction to a filthy and oppressive city. We're shocked in much the same way as Pip is having gotten used to the open, calm spaces of the Kentish marsh in the first act. This initial thrill of excitment disappates a bit as the camera moves about, and this small slice of London is revealed to be a fairly confined set. The later London scenes are shot on the much cleaner and more sanitary looking streets around the Temple, which detracts a bit from Newell's initial chaotic portrayal of London life.

The interior set design is of excellent quality. I particularly enjoyed the fossilised nature of Miss Havisham's wedding banquet, which is captured in disgusting detail. Later in the film, when Pip moves into his fancy new gentleman's apartment we can drink in the opulence of his surroundings. I'm guessing some of this was shot on location in period buildings, but we never think of these surroundings as looking 'old'. They seem casually lived in, especially the headquarters of the Finches.

I also enjoyed the costuming, which more than most of the other production design, serves to heighten the reality of the film. This is a film where outward appearance is important, and every character, low or high status is neatly stylised. All of Estelle's dresses are stunningly conceived, especially the one with a collar of purple feathers that emphasise her untrustworthy and flighty qualities. There is also a particularly amazing and extravagant dressing-gown that Pip wears, which in brilliant aquamarine jumps out of the film's dowdy and desaturated colour scheme and makes him appear both dashing and, appropriately for his state of mind, faintly peacock-like.

Despite Newell's experience there are a few confusingly edited sequences, particularly in the climactic boat sequence where in the darkness it becomes a little difficult to work out the geography of the scene. There's two boats and a steamship in semi-darkness on the water, and it's a little difficult to work out which boat is going under, or what's happened to key characters here. Another slightly bizarre decision is that the flashback expository sequences stretched out and distorted. It serves its purpose of distinguishing them from the rest of the film, but they look like the film is being played in the wrong aspect ratio. Faces are stretched horizontally, with the result that character's heads look like rugby balls. If the sequences were short this wouldn't be too much of a problem, but in the closing sequences there is maybe 15 minutes of flashback exposition, and this effect becomes quite tiring.

'Great Expectations' has much to say about contemporary society. However, I'm not sure if this mostly enjoyable adaptation, which comes hot on the heels of the 2011 BBC version, was entirely necessary. It's a film with some outstanding elements and a few great performances, but fumbles the ball in a few too many crucial areas, namely the casting of Pip and Estella. A qualified success, but not worth going out of your way for.

'Great Expectations' is on general release from November 30, 2012

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