Unexpected

It's a truism that our tastes change as we age. Things we found boring or nonsensical as children and youthful adults sometimes capture our interest as we close in on our inevitable meeting with Mr Reaper. One of the advantages of aging which helps to balance the myriad disadvantages is that we can view life through the lens of many decades of experience, often altering our perception of a thing or an event quite dramatically. Last weekend I was browsing Netflix, glumly noting that much like satellite television, there are hundreds of things to watch -- all of them terrible. Then I came across this version of the famous Dickens novel, Great Expectations.

I heard you moan. I did, all the way over here I heard it. But stick with me.

High school literature teachers and curriculum planners have a very bad habit: they assume that children are much more mature than they actually tend to be. The result is that they force people who are barely capable of comprehending a Disney movie to read complex literature which was written for a mature audience. An audience with that aforementioned lens of experience. The two obvious cases are Shakespeare and Dickens. I daresay everyone in the United States over the age of 16 is familiar with falling asleep in a classroom and having their head bounce off the work of one or both of those authors.

Great Expectations may be the stand out example of this misguided attempt to force great literature upon unready minds. It's easy to forget when you're forty-something that a teenager's mind has one primary, over-riding focus: S E X. It's not their fault, and we all go through it. Their bodies are stuffed to the gills with hormones which are constantly interfering with critical thinking skills. They lack the experience and emotional seasoning to deal with it on a rational basis, which is why their parents, society, church, etc., exist to help them get through it without turning into feral animals. Given that, don't you think it's remotely possible that deep appreciation of a complex work of literature involving adult themes of sexual warfare and emotional deception which was written in stuffy Georgian England in a dry dialect just might be asking a little too much of them?

The point of this is not to thump English Lit teachers on the nose, attractive though the notion is, but rather to point out that if you haven't seen a truly good production of this Dickens classic, you have a great opportunity to do so now. Much as Kenneth Branagh's versions of Much Ado About Nothing and Henry V caused many people to finally appreciate the beauty of Shakespeare, this production of Great Expectations brings Georgian England to life. The sets are fantastic in a way difficult to describe. London of the era has never been done better. Satis House, the abode of the creepy Miss Havesham, is appropriately and wonderfully... well, creepy. The details are astounding. You can pause a frame and spend minutes just admiring the extraordinary effort that went into placing every curio and book, every spot of dust and cobweb. If you want to see a classic "haunted house" for Halloween, you can see one here, with Havesham in the role of ghost.

Speaking of Miss Havesham, you'll be blown away by the performance of Gillian Anderson. Yes, Dana Scully. She is superb in the role. I can only imagine she is a method actor to have nailed the character so well. David Suchet (Poirot) as Mr Jaggers: perfection. Every one of the supporting actors is a consummate professional and completely believable in their respective roles.

Well, I shan't bore you by raving any further. If you've an interest, go find it on Netflix or elsewhere. And if you cringed when you read the title of the book, I would like to especially encourage you to watch it. Even if the very idea makes you break out in hives, give it thirty minutes. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.