The Personal History of David Copperfield
(Armando Iannucci, 2020)
Adapting novels for the screen is always hard. Harder still when the novel you're adapting is long, and as sprawling and detailed as the original Chuck D's David Copperfield, and surely borderline impossible if you're going to try and fit the whole thing into a little over an hour and a half.
As his follow up to The Death of Stalin, Armando Iannucci attempts the trick even New Jersey’s David Copperfield may have balked at. To me the one flaw in Iannucci's grand design, the one aspect of the adaptation he can't entirely work around, and thus the one distinct and sort of undeniable flaw of his movie is that in being based on a book concerned with a group of individuals in trying circumstances leading complicated lives, he simply doesn't have the screen time in which to really flesh the shades of these individuals out to make this the work of complexity it probably should be, and most disappointingly of all fails to really, truly get under the skin of the question that the story opens on, of whether David Copperfield is the hero of his own story.
Still, even if Iannucci's movie fails to get all of the detail of Dickens work down (it's unlikely any movie could) it succeeds on its own terms as being a damn fine movie anyway. It's sort of hard to believe it is only its directors third feature, so startling is the leap forward in creativity from the already terrific Death of Stalin. The aforementioned criticism of the movies lack of properly fleshed out characters (and it really is basically my only criticism of the film) is offset to a degree by the genuinely flawless ensemble assembled who from top to bottom do a bang up job in bringing these characters to life and finding in whatever few scenes that they get a way to bring a taste of just what they are all about.
It's cinema's shorthand, the way you get around the fact that you can't go on for a dozen pages describing the inner workings of a characters mind. If you find yourself an actor capable of realizing some of that detail in a glance, or the way they deliver a line, then you are already on your way to understanding the economic power of the medium, and Iannucci, always a tremendous director of actors, has found a whole host of them. Chief among the getting a lot out of a little brigade must be Rosalind Eleazar, Gwendoline Christie, Darren Boyd, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Aneurin Barnard, Anna Maxwell Martin.
The likes of Victor McGuire, Peter Singh, the great Peter Capaldi and Paul Whitehouse, Lynn Hunter, Bronagh Gallagher, Daisy May Cooper and the marvelous Benedict Wong all vividly etch themselves into the memory, some in a single scene, others across many, but each with that inimitable Dickensian rogues gallery, salt of the earth flavour. Morfydd Clark is wonderfully distinct in her cleverly cast dual role, and finds pathos in the midst of the broad comic purpose she serves in the movies second half. Jairaj Varsani impresses with his maturity as a young David, and most importantly matches the same sort of energy as Dev Patel at the centre of it all. For anyone impressed beyond belief at his Oscar nominated work in Lion (I wasn't) this is something on a whole other level. Not only does he manage the trick of making the sometimes wayward, abrasive titular character likeable enough to want to share in his experience, but greater still is his physicality, watching him move on screen is a delight in itself in all his gangly wonder, the stars of the silent era (to which the movie briefly pays tribute) would be proud.
Perhaps greatest of all are the holy triumvirate of Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, and Ben Whishaw. In Whishaw's Uriah Heep the great tragedy of the movies shortcomings is most embodied, a character who could easily deserve his own story, is here left to Whishaw to elevate beyond the villainous, and he is triumphant, equally vivid in his gnarled physicality, he is the dark to Patel's light, and the two of them are magic together. Speaking of, Swinton and Laurie might be a movie double team for the ages, him the straight as an arrow, dry as a date maypole for her, the mad may queen, to dance around. The little moments of dramatic, empathetic seriousness they get to mix in among the comic hijinks, brilliantly, quietly executed as only great ones can pull off.
Yet for all the rambling I have done about them, the magic of the movie for me, what carries it so far beyond Iannucci's previous movies, and all the wonderful small screen work he's done is the visual. For whatever simplification his Personal History is guilty of in putting Dickens' characters down on the page, his confidence and ingenuity as a filmmaker is ever growing. He uses a stage set framing device to drop us into, and carry us out of this world, backdrop stage curtains, and film camera footage projected on walls all lend the movie just the right amount of artificiality to make it just the right amount of clear that you ain’t reading a book, you’re watching a movie.
He rips this great work of literature from the page and makes it very specific to this medium, it’s not a lazy, dry transfer from book to screen, and for that we should be thankful. His transforming of the thing into broad, farcical, almost slapstick comedy is a risk, it plays to Iannucci’s strengths, but for me it worked, it leaves the thing half way between the work of its original author and its cinematic translator, the best of both worlds, and for me its a blast of an experience that manages to find the heart and the darkness in amongst the madness as its writer/director always manages. It’s what adaptations to screen should always strive to be, original and inventive, but still finding the heart and soul of their source.
