http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/t...bbey-ITV1.html
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Given Dickens’s taste for the fantastical it may seem unfair to criticise an adaptation for its implausibility, but I rather lost faith in this one the moment it introduced us to the full-grown Pip (Douglas Booth). Having entered the pupa of adolescence as a scowling urchin (Oscar Kennedy), he emerged as an androgynous heart-throb with a boy-band fringe, exquisitely shaped eyebrows, and skin of aftershave-advert purity. For some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, it was difficult to believe in this pouting beauty as a Victorian blacksmith’s apprentice.
Still, he didn’t linger in so unseemly a milieu for long; thanks to his unexpected expectations, so to speak, he fled to London to become a gentleman, or at any rate a stuck-up little twit. But though he looked a convincing fop, he didn’t look a convincing Pip. Pip is meant to be a plain, unprepossessing boy who yearns for a girl, Estella, in every respect out of his league; if Pip’s is by far the most photogenic face on view, it’s hard to see why he’s so dazzled by her.
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Yeah, it's hard to suspend disbelief when the main characters of a "plot" are totally at odds with the author's intentions .....
Quote:
The defining scene in BBC One’s new version of Great Expectations (Tue-Thu) was the death of Miss Havisham, the jilted bride who lives in her wedding dress. In Dickens’s novel, her dress catches light when she sits too near the fire; she dies weeks later from shock. In the adaptation, however, she solemnly lowered her veil, made a pyre of her ex-fiancé’s love letters, then stepped into the blaze and burnt herself to death.
It can’t be easy to make Great Expectations more melodramatic than it already is, but the BBC managed it.
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