I once took a semester-long course on David Copperfield in graduate school, taught by a professor who seemed to have himself sprung from some Dickensian novel. Elderly, hunched, eyes rheumy from cataracts and sporting a white comb-over that freely flew in every direction, this man packed both students and other professors from the college into the salon to hear him speak. On many days, he forgot to come to class and someone would have to call him show up. His take on the novel was beguiling, a full Freudian reading complete with bawdy language and outlandish claims. Why did Betsey Trotwood hate donkeys so much? Because she despised men and donkeys had giant dicks, this professor reasoned. And I will not put into print what he claimed Uriah Heep wanted to do to poor Agnes.
What Armando Iannucci does in his recent adaptation, The Personal History of David Copperfield, is remind us of just how strange the people are who inhabit Dickens’ novel. However, unlike scathing past films such as In the Loop and The Death of Stalin, Iannucci’s take on David Copperfield shares the wide-eyed and humanistic lens through which the narrator sees the world. The director does not hold these 19th-century weirdos in contempt, but instead lovingly celebrates their idiosyncrasies.
While Dickens’ novel sits at an imposing 800 pages, Iannucci, along with co-writer Simon Blackwell, have created a film that runs less than two hours and never once plays like a stuffy episode of “Masterpiece Theater.” In telling the story of David (Dev Patel), beginning at his birth and following his picaresque journey from the cradle to adulthood, Iannucci and Blackwell have whittled Dickens’ tale down to its very essence, crafting a fleet and adroit film that embodies the best of the novel’s spirit.
For those familiar with the novel (or those who sat through a sexualized version of its proceedings like I did in grad school), all of your favorite characters are here, from the jovial Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper) to the donkey-fearing Trotwood (Tilda Swinton) to the unctuously evil Uriah Heep (Ben Whishaw). Hugh Laurie turns in a particularly inspired turn as Trotwood’s eccentric lodger, Mr. Dick (the irony is not lost), who is obsessed with Charles I’s decapitation, and Peter Capaldi (who knocked it out of the park in Iannucci’s In the Loop) pops up as the charming-yet-always-destitute Mr. Micawber.
Iannucci also takes a step away from the rigid casting of costume dramas by recruiting an array of ethnicities in roles usually inhabited by white actors. Joining Patel (who is British and of Indian descent), Rosalind Eleazar appears as his confidante/eventual wife Agnes and Benedict Wong lights up the screen as lovable souse Mr. Wickfield. This diverse cast recontextualizes how we view historical films and sets the record straight that not only white people lived in London in the mid-1800s.
Though the film does collapse a bit by the end, The Personal History of David Copperfield is a dizzying ride drawn from a source that many modern readers would eschew as too stodgy. But Iannucci has discovered the joys that exist in Dickens’ words and, like that grad school professor, he found a way to eke out a reading that will likely entrance even the most modern-minded audiences.
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