Disney Miniseries Lives Up to ‘Great Expectations’

Pip to his great and loyal friend Herbert Pocket: “Let’s drink to expectations.” Especially to Disney-style “Great Expectations.”

After several movie versions, Charles Dickens’ memorable novel has been transferred to cable television as a rich, eloquent, voluptuously full-figured miniseries airing at 8 p.m. Sunday through Tuesday on The Disney Channel. Flawed, yes, but also a real looker, vibrantly acted, gorgeously filmed, true to its literary source and well worth the six hours’ viewing commitment.

Anthony Calf is a pip of a Pip as another of Dickens’ orphans, this one introduced to us as an 8-year-old living with his tyrannical sister and her oafishly gentle and kindhearted husband, village blacksmith Joe Gargery. Young Pip’s encounter with the escaped convict Magwitch in a graveyard and later with the elderly recluse Miss Havisham and her young female ward, Estella, will set him on a course ultimately leading to London and an empty, unhappy life amid gentle society, far from his working-class origins.

Supported in high style by an unknown benefactor, Pip is hardly an enviable hero. His values are false, and his expectations--merely to win the love of the fetching, but icy, unreachable Estella and to live a gentlemanly life of ease without working--are shallow. Indeed, before understanding the errors of his self-obsessed ways, he becomes a social snob so contemptuous of his humble background that he rejects those who have sacrificed most in his behalf.

Pip’s unlikely journey toward revelation is what makes “Great Expectations” so intriguing and is what this longer TV production, written by John Goldsmith and directed by Kevin Connor, is able to explore much more extensively than previous screen versions.

“Great Expectations” features a kettle of superior performances besides Calf’s as the adult Pip.

Jean Simmons makes a fine Miss Havisham, the cruelly sadistic and miserably unhappy witch of “Great Expectations.” This shuttered, curtained, decaying relic of a woman is withered and yellowed as old paper inside dark, musty Satis House, where she exists in self-imposed isolation from society and sunlight, bitter and loathing, still in the wedding dress and veil she wore when jilted at the altar in her youth.

Kim Thomson is the vision of hard, predatory Estella, at once luminous and void as Miss Havisham’s vehicle for vengeance against males, reared to enthrall and then abuse them, to touch hearts and be heartless, to be loved and be loveless. “I can feel nothing,” she says coolly.

In a sense, Estella is hardly more a vicarious creation of Miss Havisham’s than Pip is of the volatile Magwitch, ably played by Anthony Hopkins. It is this growling varmint’s enduring appreciation of a kindness by the 8-year-old Pip (Martin Harvey) that will largely shape the destiny and expectations of the mature Pip. And it is the kindness of guileless Joe the blacksmith, nicely rendered by John Rhys Davies, that Pip will later reward with condescension.

The late Ray McAnally makes perhaps his last small-screen appearance a suitably compelling one as the cautious, keen-minded, ambiguous attorney Jaggers, a relatively minor character who nevertheless becomes the plot’s connecting hub. It was one of McAnally’s great strengths as an actor that he never showed everything, his expressive eyes seeming always to hint at unrevealed mysteries.

This miniseries rendering of “Great Expectations” contains confusing mysteries of its own, such as how only Pip seems to age over the course of 25 years. Although cinematographer Doug Milsome (“Lonesome Dove”) provides the production with a fine look, moreover, there are occasional lapses in texture. When the young Pip’s sister (Rosemary McHale) complains about him being “grime with dirt from head to toe,” he looks as fresh-scrubbed as a choirboy.

Meanwhile, there’s a point to be made here about color versus black-and-white. If ever a story would be even more effectively and dramatically told in full, living black-and-white--a la David Lean’s brilliant 1946 movie version of “Great Expectations” in which Simmons played Estella--it is this story. Whether the foggy marshes and river mist or the cemetery where Pip first meets the frightening Magwitch or the time-warped Miss Havisham’s ghastly chamber of cobwebs, color serves not to enhance, but to drain the dark moods and tones, the terror and the almost surreal fantasy.

Above all, “Great Expectations” is fantasy, a story that touches your emotions, not your intellect. Any effort to apply logic to a plot in which practically everyone turns out to be related is sure to fail. Although some of Dickens’ seemingly bizarre characters here surely have real-life counterparts, others--Pip’s friend Pocket (Adam Blackwood) is so gratingly good you want to scream--obliterate credibility.

As always, however, the art is mostly in the telling. And even in color, Disney’s “Great Expectations” tells it exceedingly well.