Written and directed by Armando Iannucci
Starring Dev Patel, Hugh Laurie and Tilda Swinton
Running time: 1 hour and 59 minutes
MPAA rating: PG for thematic material and brief violence

be Ryan Smillie

A Charles Dickens adaptation is supposed to be dreary. Impoverished orphans in factories, delinquent debtors in prison, jilted lovers in faded wedding dresses. And these elements certainly play a major role in Dickens’s novels, through which Dickens sought to expose and satirize the bleak conditions and hidden inequalities of Victorian society. Equally present, however, are the novels’ timeless sense of humor and their unforgettably distinct characters.

For The Personal History of David Copperfield, writer-director Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It, In the Loop, Veep) cleverly chooses to emphasize the humor and the characters of Dickens’s semi-autobiographical 1850 novel over its twisting plot. Iannucci presents David Copperfield’s coming of age as he ricochets into and out of poverty from a freewheeling 21st century perspective without sacrificing the 19th century period detail. With an effortlessly diverse cast of British film, TV, and stage stars and a focus on the memorable characters who so amuse its protagonist, Iannucci brings Dickens’s classic to life for a modern audience.

As David Copperfield, Dev Patel anchors the movie, both as its narrator and as the somewhat-straight man around whom a seemingly ever-expanding amount of absurd characters orbit. Aside from the brief introduction of young David (a precocious Jairaj Varsani joining Ayush Khedekar and Sunny Pawar as yet another charming child actor to play a young Dev Patel), Patel features in nearly every scene, and the film belongs to him. Winsome and affable, Patel’s David is wise beyond his years but still subject to the foibles of youth. He serves as an attentive foil for the insanity around him, and as a game comedian himself. If there was any question as to whether Dev Patel is a star, David Copperfield should remove any doubts.

Patel is joined by an incredible lineup of Britain’s best actors and comedians. Iannucci regulars Peter Capaldi and Hugh Laurie return as the grandiloquent debtor Mr. Micawber and the kind-hearted but simpleminded (and Charles I-obsessed) Mr. Dick, respectively, both delighting in their outlandish characters. In her first outing with Iannucci, Tilda Swinton plays a perfectly eccentric Betsey Trotwood, taking fault with names that displease her, donkeys crossing her lawn, and men in general. Benedict Wong, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Bronagh Gallagher all shine in precisely detailed smaller roles, and Rosalind Eleazar makes an auspicious film debut as the responsible and observant Agnes Wickfield.

Last and absolutely least, there’s Ben Whishaw as Uriah Heep, the sycophant to end all sycophants. Whishaw animates Heep’s skin-crawling scheming and brown-nosing with a terrible haircut and the affected “‘umbleness” for which Heep is infamous. Somewhere between Veep’s Jonah Ryan and Dan Egan, but without the former’s pitiful incompetence or the latter’s slimy charm, Whishaw’s Heep is a villain right in Iannucci’s wheelhouse. 

Iannucci and co-writer Simon Blackwell’s previous high-speed, insult-heavy political comedies seem to be both fitting and unexpected antecedents for this adaptation. It is no surprise that Iannucci and Blackwell can adeptly juggle a large cast of idiosyncratic characters, but I was pleased to find that David Copperfield wasn’t simply transformed into a two-hour celebration of Victorian rudeness (which probably would have been a blast). Instead, their evocation of Dickens’s sentimentality and emotional heft along with their trademark acerbic wit reveals a heretofore unseen dimension of their writing. 

Cristina Casali’s production design and Suzie Harman and Robert Worley’s costumes underscore Iannucci and Blackwell’s emphasis on the lighter aspects of David Copperfield, crafting a vibrantly colored and vivid vision of Victorian England. When cinematographer Zac Nicholson’s lighting dims as David’s childhood happiness begins to fade, the colors retain their visual interest while their relative drabness reminds us of what David has lost. David Copperfield looks its best when pushing Iannucci’s visual boundaries, when an idyllic seaside weekend turns into a confiscated drawing, or when a drunken night on the town suddenly turns  into a silent movie. Other scenes using Iannucci’s usual hand-held camera look are not as effective as they have been in his earlier work.

Like any adaptation, and especially one of a 624-page book, certain plot lines or details need to be condensed or omitted, and until the very end, Iannucci and Blackwell’s edits do so admirably. It isn’t until the last ten or fifteen minutes that the film begins to feel rushed, this is primarily disappointing because it had been so much fun up until then. I almost wished we had a whole Iannucci David Copperfield miniseries to cover even more of the novel, or even just a few more minutes of the movie. Still, The Personal History of David Copperfield is a perceptive adaptation that recognizes the enduring appeal of Dickens is not his stuffiness or seriousness, but his humor.

In select theaters August 28th.