A CLASSIC
AFTER a career mercilessly skewering politicians and Norwich-born chat show hosts, satirist Armando Iannucci lightens up with a riotous adaptation of Charles Dickens’ most lifeaffirming novel.
If you only know the Victorian writer from enforced reading in the classroom, this rollicking farce may come as a big surprise.
The Alan Partridge and The Thick Of It writer’s clever take on Dickens’ eighth novel feels more like a sketch show than a literary classic.
In the past, Dickens, many of whose stories began life as newspaper serials, has fitted most successfully into the template of BBC TV series. So distilling a 600-page novel into a pacy two hours is a huge achievement for the writer-director.
Iannucci and his co-writer Simon Blackwell have done it by culling some of Dickens’ darker passages and upping the belly laughs.
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 on the back of the stage, David bursts 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 serialised history of the novel, 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 madcap way he guides us through our hero’s eventful journey from impoverished orphan to literary sensation.
In one scene, a giant, Pythonesque hand even appears as David is dragged out of a rare moment of childhood bliss at the boat home of Mr Peggotty (Paul
Whitehouse). After David sees his own birth, we find him being shipped off to work at a London bottle factory before befriending the posh Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard) at a boarding school and securing work as a legal proctor.
His precarious rise through the Victorian class system is like a game of snakes and ladders – whenever he climbs a level we know fate will find a way to send him back down.
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