David Copperfield with a Python twist
THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD ★★★★★
(PG, 119 mins)
Director: Armando Iannucci
Stars: Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, Ben Whishaw, Peter Capaldi, Hugh Laurie
THE TURNING ★★✩✩✩
(15, 94 mins)
Director: Floria Sigismondi
Stars: Mackenzie Davis, Finn Wolfhard, Brooklynn Prince
THE GRUDGE ★★✩✩✩
(15, 94 mins)
Director: Nicolas Pesce
Stars: Andrea Riseborough, Lin Shaye, Betty Gilpin, Frankie Faison
AN ADAPTATION of Charles Dickens’s most personal and life-affirming novel may seem like an odd project for writer-director Armando Iannucci.
After all, the Scottish satirist has spent most of his career mercilessly skewering politicians – from white hall to thewhite House to Stalin’s Kremlin.
If Dickens makes you think of enforced reading in draughty classrooms, The Personal History Of David Copperfield will come as an even bigger surprise. Iannucci, writer of TV’S The Thick Of It and Veep, has turned a 600-page novel into a pacy two-hour farce that plays more like a comedy sketch show than a stodgy literary classic.
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 walks towards 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 previous film The Death Of Stalin, and there’s a hint of Monty
Python about the madcap way he and co-writer Simon Blackwell guide 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 fear 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 sound – as we’re watching actors pretending to be made-up characters, it feels perfectly reasonable to cast them purely on the basis of their comic timing.
This is Patel’s show, but all of the minor players weigh in with riotous turns as quirky oddballs. 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-humble Uriah Heep.
In one of the funniest scenes we can almost hear the cogs whirling in the mind of Peter Capaldi’s chancer Mr Micawber as he tries to blag his way through his first lesson as a Latin teacher.
“Gymnasium, geranium, colosseum, Australasian, possum,” he announces to his bewildered students.
The biggest laughs, however, come from sight gags .a polite tussle over a bottle of booze involving the steely Trotwood and thirsty accountant Mr Wickfield (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 that it is, it feels like there’s something genuinely subversive about an upbeat satirist.
The Turning is another literary adaptation, although this one is of the eye-rolling rather than the side-splitting variety. Like the 1961 British classic The Innocents (the film that introduced precocious children to the horror genre), it’s based on Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn Of The Screw.
The usually excellent Mackenzie Davis takes the Deborah Kerr role as the governess to two orphans in a remote mansion that is haunted by the ghost of an evil stable master.
Finn-wolfhard manages to add a sinister, sexual element to the boy Miles who is now a hormonal teenager. But we’ve seen all of music video director Floria Sigismondi’s scares before – mannequins, bath-time apparitions, appliances that jump loudly into life...
Like The Innocents, it builds to an ambiguous ending. although this one is more infuriating than intriguing.
If you spliced The Turning together with The Grudge you’d have trouble spotting the join. this reboot of the 2004 Hollywood remake of the 2002 Japanese haunted house flick is another parade of horror clichés that wrong-foots us with a surprisingly interesting cast.
The talented Andrea Riseborough plays a detective investigating a string of seemingly unrelated murders at a house in Pennsylvania.
As she tries to solve the mystery, momentum-sapping flashbacks introduce us to John Cho and Betty Gilpin’s estate agents, an elderly couple played by Lin Shaye and Frankie Faison, and William Sadler’s insane detective.
Hitchcock knew there were subliminal reasons why violence in the bathroom is so disturbing, but this weekend’s second tub-based haunting feels more like a box ticked than a sanctuary breached.