Thoughts on the 1998 film “Great Expectations”

I originally saw this movie upon release, and despite it not being a box-office smash, due to circumstances in my life, it nevertheless stuck with me. I had a lot going on in my life at the time- I’d just crossed over to “30-something”, I split up from my first wife that year (we would get back together and managed to hang on until 2005 before it, mercifully for both of us, ended).

One of the things I did with my newly acquired, post-breakup freedom was go see a film that I wanted to see, sans autorisation et sans approbation. It was then that I wandered into a theater and discovered this film. Visually, this movie was like an amazing lovemaking session with a skilled partner after a long drought, only with someone you don’t quite know well enough to be that intimate with. It flooded my emotions, my senses, and my thoughts. For years I brushed off its impact as “Oh I was just in a vulnerable spot; that movie was just ‘okay’.” But my dismissive attitude might have been flawed. I watched it again recently for the first time in 25 years and discovered a new appreciation of the more subtle aspects of the film that I missed the first time.

There are some wonderful acting performances in this movie. Old-school Hollywood starlet Anne Bancroft was the brilliant and kooky old loon, but with a nefarious cunning that hurtfully impacted the lives of two (arguably three) victims. I was so focused on how visually stunning the movie (and if I’m honest, Gwyneth Paltrow) was, that I missed the sinister and Machiavellian…