A Copperfield for the 21st century
What the Dickens? Dir: Armando Iannucci 1hr 59mins (PG)
Armando Iannucci is best known for dark political satire – from The Thick of It to The Death of Stalin. But his “terrifically likeable, genial adaptation of David
Copperfield” taps into Dickens’s humanity and optimism, at the expense, perhaps, of some of the book’s bleaker aspects, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. The basic story remains unchanged: Dev Patel is our “open-hearted” hero, who is cast out of his home when his mother remarries, and sent away to an “episodic series of places, some less welcoming than others”, before ending up at the rural home of his formidable aunt Betsey (Tilda Swinton, in a “thermonuclear star turn”). Iannucci drives the story forward at a gallop, imbuing the film with a “hopeful tail-wag energy”, relishing “the drama and the absurdity, the larger than life characters, and the sheer dreamlike craziness of everything that’s going on”.
Characters bustle in and out “like guests in the Fawlty Towers lobby”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph, and you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better guest list. As well as Patel and Swinton, we have Ben Whishaw as the cringing Uriah Heep, Peter Capaldi as the optimistic, debt-ridden Mr Micawber, and Hugh Laurie as the child-like Mr Dick, to name just a few. The film “has enough multicultural credentials to give Laurence
Fox a fit of the vapours”, and though Iannucci doesn’t use the colour-blind casting to explore the novel’s themes in a fresh way, it brings welcome “new vibrancy to the period drama palette”.
As in Greta Gerwig’s recent adaptation of Little Women, the process of writing has been made part of the action, said Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. Gerwig had her film ending with Jo March presenting a publisher with the manuscript for Little Women. This movie is “bookended by scenes of Copperfield” standing in front of an audience, as though he is reading his own story during a promotional tour. As he begins to speak, he steps into a film being projected across the back of the stage – and runs across the fields to be in time for his own birth. At other points, Iannucci keeps up his film’s brisk pace by simply removing pieces of the set, to reveal the next scene lurking behind. In a Monty Python- esque touch, there is even a moment when a giant hand descends, to move Copperfield from one place to another. Ultimately, it all moves too fast, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. “Incidents and characters come and go so furiously fast it is hard to care. Or feel involved.” And anything the book has to say about class and injustice is “wholly lost” in this “breezy soap”. It is very likeable but, ultimately, not that memorable.