The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account) is the most important book Charles Dickens ever wrote. It is not the most famous or influential by any means (that would of course be A Christmas Carol), but it is the book that is the purest expression of the authors’ style, identity, and worldview. It is his most personal work, semi-autobiographical in its story of the chronology from infancy to adulthood of a character who overcomes great loss and hardships to find a fulfilling life as a writer. To read David Copperfield is to understand Dickens himself.
Armando Iannucci knew this when he decided to make a new adaptation of the novel for a twenty-first century audience. He also knew that Dickens adaptations are ubiquitous at this point. Films are a bit rarer, but every few years a new television adaptation rears its head to keep the authors’ unique world and aesthetic in the public consciousness. Thus everyone has some idea of what a Dickens story is like. Iannucci wants to challenge that, and so constructs his David Copperfield in his own way, while still maintaining some distance of ownership over it. It isn’t his story after all.
He starts by opening on David (an excellent Dev Patel) performing a public reading of the kind Dickens became especially known for in his later years. A curious thing happens though after he reads the iconic opening line –he turns and walks into the backdrop behind him, which cuts to an open park as he literally takes us to the beginning of the story. The film is full of these sorts of bursts of spontaneity, often in the transitions –another one sees the Peggottys’ boat-house turned into a kind of origami model that is broken apart by the cruel Mr. Murdstone (Darren Boyd) interrupting Davids’ imaginative reverie. And while the present-day David-as-guide device largely fizzles out by the time the character reaches adulthood, it too is quite an interesting and creative way of bringing the first-person narrator more fully into the story. I’ve never seen a David Copperfield adaptation tell its’ story with such stylistic aplomb, and it suits the whimsically witty tone that Iannucci is choosing to tell the story through. In so doing, he refreshes the material and makes an argument for getting away from the rigid parameters of other Dickensian translations. This is very much in the same spirit as Greta Gerwig’s Little Women and Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. –though without venturing to call this movie quite as good as those.
Because this take on David Copperfield, though it works more often than not, does limit the film in some key areas. Darker chapters of Davids’ life are either glossed over, under-represented, or in a couple instances, omitted entirely. One character death is avoided by way of a clever and affecting moment of meta-text, but remains unaddressed in the narrative proper. Another character is aged up to avoid a questionable relationship later in the story, and the climax is not permitted the dramatic weight it deserves. Some of these are merely a victim of pacing and the episodic density of the source material. Things such as Davids’ abuse at the hands of his step-father and his misery toiling in a workhouse are conveyed, but the film never has time to really dwell in their significance and what the experiences ultimately mean for him. This is the case for most other scenes as well, that don’t have the opportunity to feel lived in as much as they could. Furthermore the film makes what I consider to be a crucial mistake in moving back the point of David’s transition from childhood to young adulthood. Not only does it miss a few opportunities to engender greater empathy for a child alone in the world, but it hurts the depth of his relationship with characters like Betsy Trotwood (Tilda Swinton) and Agnes Wickfield (Rosalind Eleazar) –all for merely a few performance and physical comedy choices Patel is better at delivering than his younger counterpart (Jairaj Varsani).
Aunt Betsy especially, one of Dickens’ greatest characters, is sadly done a disservice for this, and in spite of the near perfect casting of Swinton. However, the films’ ensemble does come alive rather nicely. Iannucci’s regular collaborator and former Doctor Who Peter Capaldi makes for an excellent Mr. Micawber, the kindly but perennially indebted one-time caretaker of David, while Hugh Laurie is a delight as Betsy’s eccentric companion Mr. Dick. Aneurin Barnard is a fittingly Byronic Steerforth, Morfydd Clark a wonderfully infantile Dora Spenlow (and David’s mother in a rather curious casting choice), and Ben Whishaw is a thoroughly slimy and deceptively “umble” Uriah Heep. Most notably though of course is that Iannucci employed colour-blind casting for the movie, making it the most diverse David Copperfield adaptation, possibly Dickens adaptation itself. For every Daisy May Cooper, Paul Whitehouse, Gwendoline Christie, and Anna Maxwell Martin, there’s Rosalind Eleazar, Benedict Wong, Anthony Welsh, Aimee Kelly, and Nikki Amuka-Bird. And of course, Patel is at the centre of it all, the best version of David Copperfield ever put to screen. This cast, for as different as they may look from the conventional Dickens drama and for as underdeveloped as some may be, brilliantly realize that strange world of his novels and their population of fun caricatures -something here done much better than that dreary Dickensian series. The disappointments I had in its adaptation were only the more striking because of how well it reminded me why I love the work.
I keep coming back to that opening though, the way David just walks into his own story, comments on it as it’s happening, the flashes of meta-text and self-awareness that clearly owe to Iannucci’s The Thick of It. And I find myself questioning the narratives’ very honesty. “I had considered how the things that never happen, are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished”, David says near the end of the novel. Perhaps there is a hint of that in what the film is doing, its’ own recreation of the classic book mirrored in Davids’ re-contextualization of his personal history. It may account for the omission of traumas, of grimmer character failings in Mr. Micawber or Ham Peggotty, or of how David’s relationship with Dora panned out -giving a more bittersweet implication to her exit from the story than she would otherwise be afforded. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, these pages must show.” In its’ own way, this IS the novel: David Copperfields’ story as David Copperfield would tell it.
I don’t know how much Iannucci intended that, but it does give him substantial licence with Dickens’ story that he might otherwise not earn. He does well with it, and I approve. In case it isn’t clear by now, I really love David Copperfield -it’s one of my favourite books. And The Personal History of David Copperfield is a very good, if imperfect translation of that story. Iannucci found a way of bringing it into a contemporary climate in a fulfilling cinematic way without compromising the character and wit and affection and life that makes the book so special. It is a good gateway point for both the novel and Dickens’ work itself, and I hope people take it. David Copperfield’s history deserves to be told.
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