With a name like “Great Expectations,” a movie had better be good. Otherwise, the audience will feel cheated and let down.

So, does the new film version of the Charles Dickens classic live up to the promise of its name?

The film opens and we see a young boy skipping through the water and sketching the fish and ocean life he sees.

Finn (Ethan Hawke), in a voice over, explains this is not the way things actually happened, but the way he remembers them. The boy we see in the water is a young Finn.

Finn is an orphan (but then, aren’t all Dickens’ young boys orphans?) who lives with his sister and her boyfriend Joe. Soon, his sister skips out, and Joe raises the boy as his own.

While he is growing up, Finn visits Paradiso Perduto every Saturday to play with the niece of an eccentric rich woman. Paradiso Perduto is a sprawling and crumbling mansion which sits on the Gulf of Mexico. It is also one of the most visually intriguing settings I’ve seen in a long time.

The cinematography is one of the best things about this movie. The use of shadows, the rich details and the way each shot is framed is fantastic.

Paradiso Perduto, with its rotting facades and abandoned wedding decor, was particularly interesting.

The lady of the house is Ms. Dinsmoor, a very eccentric old woman played by Anne Bancroft.

She is by far the most colorful character in “Great Expectations” and has some of the films funniest lines.

She also gets scarier as the movie progresses and the years pass. Dinsmoor’s face gets extremely wrinkled, and she wears more and more make-up until she resembles a drag queen.

But Finn’s attention is focused from the beginning on Estella, Dinsmoor’s niece who is his age. “She’ll only break your heart,” Dinsmoor warns. “It’s a fact.”

Does Finn heed her words of advice and steer clear of the dangerous Estella? Well, if he did, “Great Expectations” would be about 20 minutes long.

So begins a big life-long tease. That young girl grows up to be Gwyneth Paltrow, so of course, Finn pursues her even harder.

He travels to New York where he becomes a rich and successful artist, hoping to win over Estella by being worthy of her affections. Every few years, she blows into Finn’s life like a storm, gets him all hot and bothered and then leaves him cold.

The pattern starts when both are children with a quick kiss at a fountain.

In years to come, she escalates matters until she poses nude for Finn and actually sleeps with him. He thinks all will be well until she is gone the next morning.

Gone to get married to another man.

I began to wonder how much of this abuse Finn was going to put up with. Then I realized we’re talking about Gwyneth Paltrow here.

She could chew me up, spit out the pieces and stomp them into the ground, at which point I would politely ask for some more.

One of the problems with “Great Expectations” is the film is almost all one-sided. We know Finn is in love with Estella, but very little is reciprocated.

We eventually learn that Finn was set up in a revenge-against-men plot by Ms. Dinsmoor, but by that point, the film has kind of fallen apart.

“Great Expectations” starts out as a great movie. I was totally captivated for the first half, but after that point, it loses steam. And although I’ve never read the book, I’m pretty sure Dickens never wrote anything like “I want you inside me.”

The performances are good. Hawke and Paltrow are two of the most gifted actors of their age. And the movie is a visual treat. So, while you shouldn’t go into the theater with great expectations, you can go in with pretty good ones.

3 1/2 stars out of five.

---

Mike Milik is a senior in advertising from West Des Moines.