“Great Expectations” returns … yet again

For more than a century, people have been making “Great Expectations” movies and miniseries.
The first was in 1917, starring Jack Pickford (Mary’s little brother). There have been at least 16 more, including one that had Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow AND Robert De Niro.
Now a new six-parter (shown here) starts with two episodes March 26 on Hulu, then continues for four more Sundays. It gives us a fresh version of a story everyone has read.
Well … not everyone. Olivia Colman – who plays the cold-hearted Miss Havisham – hasn’t read the book and doesn’t try to pass herself off as a scholar. “I don’t really think about things terribly deeply,” she told the Television Critics Association.
Fionn Whitehead – who stars as the adult version of Pip, a lonely guy thrust amid London’s wealthy schemers – hadn’t read the book, either. Nor had Ashley Thomas, who co-stars as Jaggers, his mentor. Both settled for an audio version.
Shalome Brune-Franklin (shown here with Whitehead) – who plays the beautiful-and-bitter Estella – had read the book, but not voluntarily. “I was so annoyed that we had to read Dickens” in school, she said. “’Why can’t we read something more modern? This is so boring?’ …. My opinion has changed since then.”
Yes, writer-producer Steven Knight grants, this is a story from long ago. (From 1861, in fact.) Still, it fits modern times almost too well. For “England and maybe for the U.S. as well, things are getting pretty tough,” he said. “And thinks were pretty tough for Pip, so I think it is very relevant.”
Earlier, Knight gave Hulu a gloomy version of Dickens “Christmas Carol.” Now he tackles this one, a logical choice: In a story filled with cruel people, one of the exceptions is Pipp’s brother-in-law, Joe the blacksmith; as it happens, Knight is a blacksmith’s son.
“I was one of seven kids,” he said. “Five of us were boys and my dad wanted all of us to shoe horses.”
His dad even encouraged them to skip school and work at his shop.“We used to turn the handle on the forge and we used to cook breakfast on the coals and all of that. It was quite a very odd upbringing …. I’ve sincerely felt like a failure ever since, because one of my brothers did it all of his life, and I could never do it. I could take the shoes off, but couldn’t put them on.”
After failing at the forge, Knight settled for being a prosperous producer. He’s written movies (including “Eastern Promises” and “The Hundred-Foot Journey”) and created or co-created TV series (including “Peaky Blinders,” “See” and, oddly, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”).
Now he has “Great Expectations,” filled with actors most Americans won’t recognize.
One exception is Colman, fresh from two queenly seasons in “The Crown.” Another is Matt Berry, best known here as Laszlo the vampire in “What We Do in the Shadows.” He plays Mr. Pumblechook, the verbose chap who hooks Pip up with Havisham and Elena.
Both are cold and rich; Biddy, Pip’s childhood friend, is the opposite. That fits Dickens’ pattern. “Perhaps because of an unhappy love affair, followed by an unhappy marriage, he tended to see women as either angels or monsters,” novelist Eileen Charbonneau wrote in a forward to a 1998 edition..
His extreme characters clicked with readers, Charbonneau wrote. Dickens’ novels “were so enormously popular that they helped expand the reading public …. Some say ‘Great Expectations’ is Charles Dickens’ best novel.”
Then again, others say they read it reluctantly or not at all. And some have merely seen the movie or TV versions that have been surfacing for the past 106 years.