After starring as the object of David Schwimmer‘s affections in “The Pallbearer” and then a kind but fallible 19th-century matchmaker in “Emma,” Gwyneth Paltrow is taking on a very different kind of character as the hardhearted Estella in the latest film adaptation of “Great Expectations.”
Mitch Glazer, who also did a comedic take on Dickens in “Scrooged,” scripted the story, and Alfonso Cuaron, who lent his lush visual style to the adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnetts’s “A Little Princess,” directed. While other film adaptations of “Great Expectations” have attempted to stay true to the Charles Dickens classic– excruciating detail, social commentary, and all– this newest version pares the plot down to the bare minimum and modernizes it for Generation X appeal.
The story is now set in present-day Florida; social climber Pip has been renamed Finn and made into a struggling artist, and deranged Miss Havisham, while still jilted by her fiance on their wedding day, is now an eccentric Florida heiress named Nora Dinsmoore. But the basic story remains the same, with Finn’s heart being broken by the wealthy and distant Estella. Paltrow was convinced to take Estella’s part by the chance to make a departure from her previous roles.
“You would think that, based on the other things that I’ve done, that it wouldn’t appeal to me,” Paltrow said. “But I was really excited to get a chance to do something so completely different, and to play a woman who is cold. She’s detached, she’s manipulative, but she’s also very complicated. There are mitigating circumstances, and she’s been raised by a woman who has encouraged her to be this way, and I think that she’s very much in conflict with that.”
Estella was raised by her aunt Nora to break mens’ hearts. For Estella’s first victim, Dinsmoore picks out Finn, a poor orphan boy played in adulthood by Ethan Hawke. Estella becomes the center of Finn’s life and the subject of his paintings. When Estella suddenly leaves for art school in New York, he is so heartbroken that he stops painting. Gwyneth Paltrow said that she didn’t try to make her femme fatale character likable.
“I didn’t try and do that because I think that if you try and do that, you’re really taking away from the integrity of the character,” she said. “You can’t play somebody who’s innately non-likable and kind of be winking to the audience, ‘But see, I’m really nice,’ you know what I mean? But what I tried to give her was depth.”
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Finn follows Estella to New York, where he hopes that successfully exhibiting his art will convince her that he’s worthy of her affection. New York, of course, was not in the original book. There was skepticism that the film could remain faithful to the novel despite such drastic plot changes, but Paltrow felt that her role in “Great Expectations” actually involved a lot less pressure than her role in “Emma,” another book adaptation which stayed true to its period.
“I felt much less bound to that responsibility than I did during ‘Emma,'” she said. “I mean, that is a responsibility. This was sort of like, I really felt like, our poetic license was very vast and that we could do whatever we wanted to do. Which is interesting, because if you keep the same dialogue and make it in the same period, I think you have more of a responsibility to the material. But this, it’s just a very loose adaptation.”
Fans of Paltrow‘s sweet side needn’t despair. Her next film, “Sliding Doors,” will feature her in a much more familiar role. As the London public relations consultant Helen, she is the subject of a study in parallel realities where taking the subway home from work has the potential to change her life… or not. Half the film examines the possibility that she makes her train, gets home earlier than usual, and finds her boyfriend in bed with another woman. Will she move out and find true love with another man? The other half of the film asks what might happen if she never makes the train and doesn’t find out about the affair. Paltrow said that she had no qualms about making an independent film when she could easily have gotten a bigger project.
“When you get a script that’s so original, and funny, and the language is so precise and so rich, and so romantic… I’m just completely swept up in it,” she said. “I didn’t have one negative thought about it. You know, I just thought, this is a dream, to go make a little, sweet movie like this.”
“Sliding Doors” also stars John Hannah of “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” John Lynch, and Jeanne Tripplehorn. It is expected to be released in time for Valentine’s Day.
