DICKENS WITH 2020 VISION

This exuberant multi-ethnic version of David Copperfield sparkles with the spirit of Britain today, without abandoning its Victorian roots

YEARS pass without a single film based on an autobiographical novel about an aspiring young writer emerging out of genteel impoverishment in the mid‑19th century . . . then, what do you know, two come along in quick succession.

Moreover, there are further similarities between Greta Gerwig’s beguiling Little Women and Armando Iannucci’s vision of Charles Dickens’s most personal story.

Both directors have taken bold liberties with their source material, Gerwig by tinkering with the chronology of Louisa May Alcott’s novel and Iannucci, well, with pretty much everything.

Most conspicuously of all, he has given David Copperfield a racially diverse cast, starting with Dev Patel (and Jairaj Varsani as the younger incarnation) in the title role. Likewise, the bibulous lawyer Mr Wickfield is played by Benedict Wong, an actor of Hong Kong‑ Chinese heritage, with black actress Rosalind Eleazar as Wick‑ field’s noble daughter, Agnes.

What this might do to Laurence Fox’s blood pressure, heaven knows. As you may be aware, he’s the actor revelling in the social media spotlight following a racism brouhaha on BBC1’s Question Time last week.

Fox has since attacked the Oscar‑nominated World War I film 1917 for its ‘forced diversity’ in featuring an ‘incongruous’ Sikh soldier. He ain’t seen nothing yet. But then, Dickens was a master at portraying contemporary soci‑ ety, which is why the adjective ‘Dickensian’ is so often inter‑ changeable with ‘Victorian’.

And that is what Iannucci has done. With costumes, sets and language, he has rooted the story firmly in the era in which it was created. Yet by populating it with characters of different ethnic backgrounds, he evokes Britain today, as well as Britain in 1850. I’m quite sure Dickens would have approved. Besides, the man behind the biting TV satire The Thick Of It, whose last film was 2017’s The Death Of Stalin (in which Jason Isaacs memorably played the mon‑ strous General Zhukov with a broad Yorkshire accent), was never remotely likely to give us a conventional interpretation of David Copperfield.

Iannucci even throws in some surreal flourishes of which Terry Gilliam (see The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, right) would be proud; a giant hand that inter‑ venes at one point seems almost calculatedly Pythonesque.

In some ways, however, this picture is a victim of its own exu‑ berance, because when that flags, it’s easy to be reminded that a 600‑page novel and a two‑ hour film form an uneasy equa‑ tion. Some storylines have had to be sacrificed altogether, and others greatly condensed.

We don’t see the whole trajectory of the ghastly Uriah Heep’s story, which is a shame, because he is splendidly played