Novel Dickens revamp
THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD ★★★★★ (Cert 12A, 119mins)
WRITERdirector Armando Iannucci has spent much of his career mercilessly skewering politicians, most notably in The Thick Of It, Veep and The Death Of Stalin, but here he lightens up with a riotous adaptation of Charles Dickens’ most life-affirming novel.
In the past, Dickens’ serialised stories have fitted most snugly into the template of BBC TV series. So distilling 600 pages into a pacy two-hour farce is a huge achievement for the Scottish satirist and his co-writer Simon Blackwell.
It begins with the esteemed writer David Copperfield (a very likeable Dev Patel) reading his autobiography from a lectern to a rapt audience of bewhiskered Victorians. Then a scene from his first chapter is projected onto the back of the stage, David walks through the backdrop and we’re thrown into the first of a series of suspiciously tall tales.
This devilishly clever framing device not only honours the novel’s serialised history but prepares us for the film’s heightened sense of reality.
There was a juicy role for Michael Palin in Iannucci’s The Death Of Stalin and there’s a hint of Monty Python about the anarchic way Iannucci guides us through our hero’s eventful journey from impoverished orphan to literary sensation.
After David witnesses his own birth, we see him shipped off to work at a London bottle factory before befriending Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard) at boarding school and finding work as a legal proctor. Along the way, he meets an array of weird and wonderful characters played by a racially diverse cast, sometimes within the same fictional family. This isn’t as jarring as it may sound.As we’re watching actors pretending to be made-up characters, it makes sense to cast them purely on the basis of their timing.
Patel is excellent but all of the minor players weigh in with delightfully quirky performances. Hugh Laurie turns back the clock to his Blackadder days to play the potty,
King Charles-obsessed Mr Dick,Tilda Swinton attacks the donkey-hating Betsey Trotwood with relish and Ben Whishaw drips oily menace as ever-so-’umble Uriah Heep.
But most of the laughs come from sight gags. A polite tussle over a bottle of booze between the steely Trotwood and thirsty accountant MrWickfield (a brilliant Benedict Wong) wouldn’t feel out of place in a silent comedy.
Is Iannucci mellowing with age? I’m not so sure.With the world in the state it is, there’s something subversive about an upbeat satirist.