WORDPLAY GETS TOP BILLING
Iannucci’s version of David Copperfield revels in Dickensian thrust and parry
When I first saw the title of this adaptation of the Dickens classic, I thought director and co-writer Armando Iannucci was having a lark.
Turns out the full title of the novel, in the Victorian way of things, was The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account). And you thought Birdman was a mouthful!
The novel turns 170 this year, but loses none of its immediacy and wit in Iannucci’s telling, which includes unremarked-upon colour-blind casting, and features Tilda Swinton as the narrator’s aunt, whose country cottage is a strict no-donkey zone; Benedict Wong as the alcoholic businessman Wickfield; and Rosalind Eleazar as his no-nonsense daughter, Agnes.
Dev Patel takes centre stage (literally in the opening scene) as Copperfield.
Or you may think of him as Dickens, as this was the author’s most autobiographical novel.
You won’t be alone in changing his name.
The movie plays up the characters’ habit of renaming the protagonist on a whim. So his mother calls him Davy; his wife,
Doady; a friend at school, Daisy; his aunt, Trotwood; and so on.
Copperfield is played in his youth by Jairaj Varsani, who ably introduces the character’s imaginative side and his gift of mimicry, first in his voice, and eventually with his pen.
Iannucci and frequent co-writer Simon Blackwell steal liberally from the novel (rough fingers are likened to “a pocket nutmeg grater”), as well as from other Dickens works — “melancholy mad elephants” from Hard
Times — and even create a few lines of their own in the great writer’s style, as when his aunt is described as “fierce, like a birthing badger.”
The style, while understandable, is so period-specific that when one of the chapter titles announced “I am banished to London,” I read it in my head with an extra syllable: Ban-ished.
The picaresque adventure follows Copperfield through his life, from working in a bottling factory to striking up a friendship with the impecunious Micawber (Iannucci regular Peter Capaldi, brilliant in the role), and finding a home with his aunt and her eccentric lodger Mr. Dick (Hugh Laurie, also brilliant).
Along the way he falls, heavily and almost simultaneously, for Agnes and also Dora Spenlow, daughter of the man who employs Copperfield as a proctor. (Patel confides in voice-over that despite taking the job he never quite figured out what it was.)
Dickens seems like a perfect fit for the British filmmaker. In addition to his more famous works — TV’S Avenue 5 and Veep, film’s The Death of Stalin and In the Loop — Iannucci has been involved in both a 2012 documentary about the relevance of Dickens, and a short-lived TV show, Time Trumpet, that presented a fictional look back at the early 21st century from the perspective of 2032.
He’s got the long and the short of history.
But he’s also a director who delights in the thrust and parry of wordplay and rhetoric. Copperfield tells his listeners at the end of the film: “My truest hope is that I might grow half as strong and wise in the telling of their story as they have grown in the living of it.”
It’s clearly the filmmaker confiding a similar hope to the audience in the cinema. He needn’t worry.