Many years before, when Pip was a child, he was terrorized into bringing food and brandy to Magwitch, who was hiding out in chains in a swamp. Magwitch shows up the pride and prejudice of society and displays the weakness in the callow young hero. And at the end, Magwitch reveals his own misguided nobility when he pays as villains must always pay. As George Orwell once remarked, however, Dickens' success as a writer was in attacking everybody and offending nobody, as if you had struck an elephant with a cane, and the beast considered it a good tickle. Gwyneth Paltrow turns Estella from a figurative cocktease to a literal one, through plentiful use of a skinny body double.
Some choices work well in the new film.
Havisham's manor, Satis House, here called Dinsmoor House, is a beautiful jungle ruin in the Gulf Coast, and I admired the economy of the way De Niro's Lustig spills the beans in one half-muttered line. Truly, as Joe Bob Briggs likes to say, here is a plot that doesn't get in the way of the story. Making Lustig a Mafia hit man rather than a desperate petty criminal, however, undoes a significant aspect of this unruinable story. The tweaking of the new film version hides both the compassion and the snobbery underneath Dickens' humanitarianism. The entire novel of Great Expectations online.