London has seldom looked less inviting in a new adaptation of “Great Expectations.” Hard and stark, “it recalls a chessboard, where players vie ceaselessly for dominance,” inkookang writes.
Dickens gets debauched by sex, drugs, and gunfire in a new adaptation of “Great Expectations,” streaming on Hulu. The six-part FX/BBC miniseries is a slice of Victoriana soaked in Red Bull which avows, too brashly at times, that it is no staid PBS affair. The British writer Steven Knight casts gothic and colonial shadows over the beloved bildungsroman, which follows Pip, an orphan whose aspirations to become a gentleman are bankrolled by a mysterious benefactor.
Still, there’s plenty of untamed terrain just beyond Pip’s village. Hiding among the marshes and the mist—which the pilot’s director, Brady Hood, imbues with an eerie otherworldliness—are two escapees from a prison ship: Magwitch and Compeyson , mortal enemies whose convoluted history will eventually be revealed. Starving and still shackled, Magwitch sneaks up on Pip and threatens the boy into fetching him some bread and a file—an act that will prove fateful.
Under Miss Havisham’s supervision, Pip is to provide company to her adopted daughter, Estella , who, in a later century, would have some doozies to tell on a therapist’s couch. Though instinctively icy to Pip, Estella is happy to indulge his hopes of one day joining her caste. “A gentleman only has to observe good manners with those who are members of his own class,” she informs him. “Those below are for using.” Pip’s ambition blinds him to the obvious inference: he, too, is being used.
The miniseries’ early episodes are propelled forward by a tension: between Pip’s yearning to escape the stagnancy of his sleepy village and the mounting signs that the elaborate niceties of the upper class that he finds so enchanting also deflect from an exploitative brutality. Pip is not totally without compunction; he recoils when a merchant, admiring the manacles that Joe has forged for prisoners, attempts to commission a large number of chains for “African cargo.
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