As a war rages on in the province of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, a young girl becomes transfixed by the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations, which is being read at school by the only white man in the village. In 1991, a war over a copper mine in the South Pacific tore the island of Bougainville apart. The reclusive “Popeye” (Hugh Laurie) offers the children in fourteen-year-old Matilda’s tiny village an escape with Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. But on an island at war, fiction can have dangerous consequences.
Know what you're in for, because what you're in for is difficult.
– Linda Holmes,
NPR,
11 Sep 2012
rotten:
Adamson mixes magical realism with hard-hitting historical drama in a way that feels both contrived and questionable, even if the filmmakers clearly have their hearts in the right place.
– Jordan Mintzer,
Hollywood Reporter,
12 Sep 2012
rotten:
Mr. Pip doesn't start going seriously awry until its second half, when things get more eventful in ways that are compacted from the novel yet seem more disconnected.