A full list of recent reviews, interviews and table talk. Often, though, in movies, it's less important for filmmakers to be faithful to a novel's particulars than to its spirit. Reimagining a book can be just as true a mark of respect, a demonstration that the heart of a work is strong enough to support unexpected transformations. Each of them has already proven himself an inspired adapter. They emerge here as wizards.
All great novels are strange in their own way.
That has less to do with the different customs of another time and place than with the quicksilver mysteriousness of great books, the way they resist being summed up by their theme. Pip, who rejects the honest and simple man who raises him, and then the even less lofty man who turns out to be his benefactor, calls up every conflict we've ever felt between yearning for the larger world and wishing to remain loyal to the smaller one we came from. That's the primal pull of Dickens. We experience a Dickens novel through the skin of the protagonist. In its way, New York feels just as strange.