No Two Great Expectations Films End the Same Way

Spoilers follow for the last scene of four screen versions of Great Expectations, and for the closing image of the novel itself.

Adaptations of this novel were never choosing between faithful and unfaithful, because the book itself supplies two endings and its author preferred them at different times. That is the same problem the playable Great Expectations hands to a player at the last doorway. Here is what each of the four did with that inherited choice, in order of release.

🎬 Why the endings disagree in the first place

Dickens finished Great Expectations twice. The version in print sends Pip back to the ruined garden to meet Estella and closes on a line about what he could not see there; the version he wrote first has them meet by accident in London traffic, with Estella remarried, and part after a handshake. The full comparison, with both texts quoted, is the subject of its own essay, and the only thing that matters here is that every director has inherited a choice rather than an instruction.

“I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”

A sentence that reports what the narrator failed to see is very hard to photograph, which is the practical problem every director on this list has run into. A camera has to show two people either leaving together or not, and the novel’s last line is built specifically to avoid answering that. Each of the four solved it differently, and the differences are not small.

🕯️ 1946: the ending the screenwriters wrote themselves

David Lean’s film opened on 16 December 1946 and remains the prestige version, with five Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and two wins, for black-and-white cinematography and art direction, according to Turner Classic Movies’ own article on the film. That piece also records the detail most viewers never learn: the ending is not Dickens at all. Cecil McGivern and Kay Walsh wrote it, because neither of the novelist’s two endings struck them as workable on screen, and Walsh is credited with the idea.

What they wrote is the most emphatic finish any version has attempted. Pip returns to the decaying house, finds Estella preparing to shut herself inside it exactly as her guardian did, and physically demolishes the arrangement, tearing down curtains and opening boarded windows before telling her he never stopped loving her; the standard reference on the film records that she hesitates, embraces him, and leaves the house with him, which is a degree of certainty neither of Dickens’s own drafts ever offers a reader.

The Gates of Satis House is a doorway in the playable Great Expectations: the clocks stopped at twenty minutes to nine, the bride still in the dress, and you sent for to play — the room every version of this story has to reckon with, whether it films it in Kent or rebuilds it somewhere else entirely. Role-play Great Expectations →

🌊 1998: the same story, moved to Florida and Manhattan

Alfonso Cuaron’s version opened on 30 January 1998 and changes almost everything except the shape. Pip becomes Finn, a Gulf Coast boy who paints; Miss Havisham becomes Ms. Nora Dinsmoor; Magwitch becomes Arthur Lustig; Estella keeps her name and the job. Empire’s review and James Berardinelli’s both describe the transplant to Florida and New York, and both treat the class ladder as the thing that does not survive the move intact.

The last scene is the quietest of the four, and the only one that happens nowhere near a Kentish marsh. Cuaron has moved everything, so there is no Satis House left for Finn to walk back into, no forge to return to, no garden wall to meet anybody at. What he gets instead is the end of an American money story, and Berardinelli’s verdict on it is that the ending is not embellished in the Hollywood manner. Lean had used the same beat fifty-two years earlier to hand an audience a declaration, a torn-down curtain and a walk out into the daylight, and this film declines every one of those on its way out of the story it has been telling.

🏚️ 2012: Dickens’s own revised ending, in the wrong place

Mike Newell’s film premiered at Toronto on 11 September 2012 and opened in Britain that November, with Jeremy Irvine as Pip, Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham, Holliday Grainger as Estella, Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch and Robbie Coltrane as Jaggers, per the standard reference, which also records the screenwriter treating the choice between the novel’s two endings as the production’s central problem.

They chose the printed one, and then moved it. A conversational review in the Journal of Victorian Culture Online describes the film using the subdued, ambivalent revised ending with Pip and Estella leaving together, while noting that the location was altered, so the pair reunite in the yard of a comfortable house rather than among the ruins. The reviewers there think the relocation costs the scene most of its force, which is a reasonable complaint about a book whose whole final image is a garden that outlived the building.

💍 2023: Pip marries somebody else

Steven Knight’s six-episode series ran on BBC One and FX on Hulu between 26 March and 30 April 2023, with Fionn Whitehead as Pip, Olivia Colman as Miss Havisham and Shalom Brune-Franklin as Estella, per the series reference. The reaction to it online was largely about its cast rather than its fidelity, which turned out to be the wrong thing to watch, because the fidelity is where this version does something no other has tried.

• ✅Estella proposes, and Pip declines.She asks him to propose with Miss Havisham’s ring and he refuses, telling her what she needs is her equal, according to Den of Geek’s account of the finale.
• ✅He marries Biddy. The schoolteacher who taught him his letters in the first episode is the person he ends the series with, and Estella is last seen dancing with Jaggers at that wedding.
• ✅Miss Havisham survives her own fire.She changes out of the wedding dress, shoots Compeyson, sets Satis House alight deliberately, and walks out of it, which inverts the novel’s accident entirely.

🍿 Which one to put on tonight

It depends entirely on which unresolved thing you want resolved. Lean’s is the one to watch if you want the romance settled and the house opened up, and it is also the best-made object of the four by a distance. Cuaron’s is the one to watch if the class machinery of the novel bores you and the obsession interests you. Newell’s is the closest to the book on the page while being the least interested in its final image, and Knight’s is the one to watch if you have read the novel twice and want an argument with it.

None of them agrees with another and none of them fully agrees with either Dickens, who wrote the question down twice and answered it differently both times, then left the record standing that way for everybody who came after him to pick through.