Alfonso Cuarón's Meditation on the Body
Revisiting Great Expectations (1998)
When I was 14, I saw Great Expectations at New Orleans’s Prytania Theatre (which, I have just confirmed, still exists and is still showing films, which brings unprecedented peace to my soul). For most of my adolescence, I wanted out of New Orleans, a city that only ever seemed to confirm that I would never be decadent enough or sexy enough or cool enough for anyone, and I wanted out of my body for more-or-less the same reasons. But there were a few spots I could rely on for feeling something like contentment, something like unadulterated gratitude for being alive. One of those places was, unshakably, the darkness of the Prytania Theater, and no more strongly so than that night.
Like Anne Rice’s prose, Alfonso Cuarón's visual poetry helped me feel the beauty of the city I was in. The story’s protagonist, renamed Finn (most likely because that sounds hotter than Dickens’s “Pip”), lives in a coastal Florida town, in which his neglectful sister Maggie and her fisherman husband Joe are barely getting by. The Gulf Coast surroundings were so viscerally familiar that it was immediate and effortless to connect the scenery to New Orleans — specifically the borderline-erotic shots of Mrs. Havisham’s decrepit mansion, which is replete with overgrown ivy. (There’s a specific set of genetic encoding that produces, in New Orleanians, a near-psychotic appreciation for overgrown ivy.)
Mrs. Havisham herself, as portrayed by Anne Bancroft, is a lot of women I knew through my father. They nurse eternal heartbreaks from decades past, they wear extravagant clothing adorned with myriad jewels and sequins, and while they may not literally dance exclusively to various versions of “Bésame Mucho,” their passion for Latin music of the 50’s and 60’s goes deep. So I know that woman, I’ve known her all my life, and she does not feature in nearly enough movies, likely because too much of the country believes she isn’t real. But we didn’t come here to talk about Mrs. Havisham (though, if you’d like to, get in touch.) We’re here to talk about what really makes this cinematic masterpiece stand apart from Dickens’s literary one, its meditation on the body as anchored in Finn’s portrait painting.
The first time I saw this film, I came away convinced that the act of painting someone’s portrait was potentially more intimate and more erotic than sex. Here’s a thing I don’t often say about my 14-year-old self, so I’ll relish this declaration now: she was right. Meaningless sex shouldn’t be a thing yet we all know it is. Feeling-less sex shouldn’t be a thing yet we all know it is. But you can’t paint someone’s portrait well without feeling, and you definitely can’t exhibit that level of patience and attention to your subject without ultimately believing that this is a meaningful act. (Perhaps it’s not always the breathless, all-life-stops-for-this meaning that Finn carries for the act of painting Estella, but for our purposes, Alfonso Cuarón's Great Expectations (1998) is the world, best to go with it.)
Finn paints Estella many times, as directed by Mrs. Havisham, beginning in childhood when Estella is her most openly disdainful toward the guileless boy, all by her strict training, of course. When Mrs. Havisham’s despiar turned to column-stone-hard bitterness, she resolved to raise Estella to be, by her broken estimation, a strong woman who could never get hurt, and this meant she rejected all love on its face, while assiduously courting attention. “She’ll only break your heart, it’s a fact,” Mrs. Havisham assures Finn, knowing she’ll make sure this is true. “But you will still pursue her.” And oh, how he does. And how Estella makes sure that he will never stop.
There’s a separate essay to be written in an unrelated forum about the stark class differences between Estella and Finn. They’re paramount to the story and to each character but they’re not essential to the body stuff and Body Stuff is the crux of what I’m here to make you think about, so. Let’s fast forward past their unexpected sexual-but-not-sex dalliance when they’re teenagers in the 80’s and go straight to Finn sitting alongside Estella’s Art World friends in New York, doing his best to schmooze. All his life, Finn’s known how to be polite. But no one taught him how to schmooze, and every time light-laughter comes trickling out of an Art World Friend’s mouth, we cringe. “Finn painted my portrait when I was 10 years old,” a glowing and grown-up Estella announces to her chic small group, including her high-profile boyfriend. “It was beautiful.”
She says that now. As a child she had thrown aside the thoughtful and meticulous portrait as though the canvas was a piece of old newspaper, much to Miss Havisham’s approval. But Finn will never challenge her. He takes the moment to say, only to her, the group is clearly gone now as far as he is concerned, “I want to paint you again.” Even at 14 I knew that “paint” was not the end-all be-all verb being expressed here. Maybe it was the close-up on Ethan Hawke’s face as he said it, maybe it was the tone of his voice or the almost-imperceptible shift in Estella’s calculated vibe. Her boyfriend, whose knowledge of the art world knows no bounds, asks if he charges for his work by the hour or by the inch, and of course everyone cracks up, except Finn.
And, true to the nature of someone you should never give your heart to, Estella barges into his apartment while he’s still asleep and announces that he should get to work. Clearly unaccustomed to having the girl of his dreams anywhere near him while he’s alone, he’s confused. When she says, “Don’t you want to paint me?” he says, “Right now?” and again, we’re clearly having an exchange about virility here, and of course, he’s got it, he’s been waiting for this. But he doesn’t seem to be expecting that she’ll take off her clothes. By the time she’s standing in front of him in black lingerie, her shoes the last to be gracefully taken off, she says, “Do you want me sitting or standing?”
Poor Finn has obviously forgotten that there is such a thing as words signifying anything at all, and he barely manages to reply, “Um, both? I mean, whichever. I mean, sitting?”
The lingerie comes off, and Pulp’s “Like a Friend” plays (a favorite song of all time on an evergreen perfect soundtrack), and Finn gets to work. To work, of course, he has to stare. Hard. And this is what blew my mind when I was 14 and still does. My entire life up to that point felt like it was nothing but fending off stares. That redheaded girl with her weird gait what happened to your leg did you get into an accident what happened what happened what happened what happened what happened did you get hurt what happened to you is that permanent what were you doing what happened fuck all of you, though of course at 14 I never said that. What I had never imagined contemplating was a world wherein someone could be staring at you, really staring at you, and it could be for reasons you like.
By the time he’s finished, Finn’s humble studio is papered with portraits of Estella. When her boyfriend comes over unannounced the next day, obliquely admitting that he’s insecure about the resurgence of Finn and Stella’s lifelong friendship, he gazes rapt and nigh-disbelieving at the portraits. He has never truly appreciated how beautiful she is. He has never learned how to stare.
The rest of the film is dramatics, lyrical and magnificently-shot dramatics, which I could go on about endlessly but which aren’t really relevant here. If you’re familiar with Dickens’s novel you know that grown-up Pip is an asshole supreme, but grown-up Finn remains guileless and likeable, which is all for the best, isn’t it, because Ethan Hawke is basically a blond intellectual Keanu and who wants to see him be an asshole, come on. Perhaps, though, this consistence in good-heartedness has a deeper significance: no one can out-asshole Estella.
I’ll end on a tangential topic, Finn’s artistic success. The night of his first gallery opening, a milestone in his career, he barely glances at the powerful people his agent is desperate to introduce him to, because all he wants to know is if Estella is here, has she seen the paintings — he later informs us that he eventually went to Paris where he “got everything I thought I wanted.” At 14, I didn’t understand why a painter was sacrifcing career focus for this one particular girl, and, in perhaps an odd reversal of, hey, EXPECTATION on this front, I feel differently this time around. When Finn desperately shouts up to Estella’s window, “Everything I’ve ever done has been for you! Anything that might be special in me is you,” I found myself, against my better judgement, thinking, “Yeah, I get that. I really get that.”
But no one needs that essay. Not yet.
