Armando Iannucci (2019)
The ‘Personal History’ in the title may be unexpected but it derives from Dickens’s original one – The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery. Even so, it seems to promise David-Copperfield-as-you’ve-never-seen-him-before – a promise on which Armando Iannucci delivers. The film, written by him and Simon Blackwell, opens on an eagerly expectant theatre audience. David (Dev Patel) comes on stage and begins to tell his story – a nod both to Dickens’s own theatre readings and to the autobiographical aspect of his favourite among his novels. At the start of David’s account, his adult self appears on the screen to observe his birth and early infancy. It’s a neat bridge to the main narrative – and a nice acknowledgement of the impossibility of telling one’s life story from the very beginning. Once the boy David (Jairaj Varsani) is old enough to have conscious memory, the grown-up version is surplus to requirements and disappears from sight until some years down the line.
These devices also signal the confident, extensive artificiality of The Personal History of David Copperfield, and a meta aspect that comes increasingly to the fore. David soon develops the habit of making notes of what he hears around him, from the sayings of Clara Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper) onwards. He and Dora Spenlow (Morfydd Clark) are parted not by death but by his writing her out of his life story – at Dora’s insistence. Standing beside David as he works on his manuscript and worried she doesn’t really fit in his world, airhead Dora still wants to be helpful. She suggests that, while David writes, she could hold the thing that holds his pens. After doing so for a few seconds, she reiterates that she doesn’t really fit and takes her leave of the film. Its happy finale is a garden party: David’s guests are the people he’s known who became the people in the book that’s made his name.
Dora’s exit is a good example of how blithely Iannucci and Blackwell depart from Dickens’s storyline whenever it suits them – and how they minimise the extent and the weight of mortality in it. When Murdstone (Darren Boyd) and his sister (Gwendoline Christie) bring David news of his mother’s death, their announcement is a kind of variation on the Dead Parrot sketch (David’s mother is not well, not at all well, seriously ill, in fact she’s dead – and already buried). The privileged rotter James Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard) drowns but the decent, wronged Ham Peggotty (Anthony Welsh) survives, instead of, as in Dickens, dying in an attempt to save the life of the man who ruined his own. In other words, the film has both get their just desserts.
Early on, there’s a shot of David’s father’s gravestone. It shows his date of death as 1841 but the stone is weathered, as if being observed from a time much closer to the present day. That detail reflects Iannucci’s treatment more generally. He has said (to the Daily Telegraph) that he aimed:
‘to make a film that doesn’t feel hidebound by the conventions of a costume drama or a period drama. … I want it to feel real and present, even though it’s set in 1840 [sic] in London. I want it to feel immediate and current. And therefore I want the cast to be much more representative of what London looks like now, and I want a lot of the behaviour in the film to feel current and contemporary.’
This David Copperfield is certainly a modernisation of Dickens but it doesn’t ‘feel real’ – it almost exults in putting on a show. Scenes involving more than a couple of characters often have a pantomime quality. Shot by Zac Nicolson and with a production design/art direction team headed by Cristina Casali and Nick Dent, the film is often pleasing to look at. But the rural images seem deliberately to suggest contemporary landscape paintings rather than real country roads and meadows. The decor in the study of the Charles-the-First-obsessed Mr Dick (Hugh Laurie) looks what it is: a witty piece of set dressing (by Charlotte Dirickx). Staying in Dan Peggotty (Paul Whitehouse)’s Yarmouth boat-house, the boy David makes a drawing of the place; as he does so, a huge fist comes through the roof of the actual house and Iannucci cuts back to Blunderstone Rookery, where Murdstone confiscates his stepson’s drawing. It’s a visually and dramatically effective moment but also typical of Iannucci’s conscious playfulness, which builds up to the self-referential closing stages. Christopher Willis’s pleasant, conventional score often seems to be suggesting what we might have been feeling had the story been told with a straighter face.
The colour-blind casting is another important part of the modernisation (although Iannucci, while wanting ‘the cast to be much more representative of what London looks like now’, has also stressed in interview the ethnic diversity of Victorian London). The cast includes, as well as Dev Patel, Jairaj Varsani and Anthony Welsh, Rosalind Eleazar (Agnes Wickfield), Benedict Wong (her father), Nikki Amuka-Bird (Steerforth’s mother) and Divian Ladwa (the doctor who delivers the baby David). The colour blindness doesn’t extend to letting these non-white actors, with the qualified exception of Amuka-Bird, play disagreeable characters. It’s a pity Iannucci wasn’t bold enough to go for a black Murdstone or Steerforth (more of a pity when the white actors playing them are unsatisfactory); even so, the diversity here is a big advance on the insulting arrangements in Mary Poppins Returns. But colour-blind casting also (inevitably) reinforces the film’s unreality. It’s just about possible that the Asian-looking Mr Wickfield might have fathered mixed-race Agnes. There’s no way that Mrs Steerforth and James could really be mother and son. This lack of realism isn’t a weakness but it confirms the film as artifice – a reinterpretation of Dickens through a twenty-first-century lens, producing a view congenial and ‘relevant’ to present-day liberal sensibilities.
That’s the governing principle here. It means that some elements of the story – such as people sleeping on the streets – are to be taken straight. At the same time, it allows Iannucci and Simon Blackwell to write comedy dialogue that (they think) slips down more easily than Dickens’s. (‘Let’s leave Charles the First’s head to one side for a while’, says Betsey Trotwood (Tilda Swinton) to Mr Dick. ‘Yes, pick it up later,’ he replies.) Some of the plot changes are amusing reminders of what felt awkward in the original. It’s not only meta considerations that dictate Dora’s departure from the story: David doesn’t really love her and she’s too silly to bear the weight of being killed off. That’s how Dora seemed in the book too. The removal of Barkis (and his catchphrase) is a relief. Sometimes, though, Iannucci and Blackwell perpetuate Dickens’s tendency to flog a joke to death, though their choices may be different. It’s a shame, for example, that Mr Wickfield’s partiality to drink has been turned into a laborious running gag.
Iannucci’s approach yields very variable results in terms of performances. Ben Whishaw is the best Uriah Heep I’ve seen. He makes Heep’s anxiety to impress grotesquely funny and, to a greater extent than is usual with the character, roots his despicable behaviour in bitter resentment at being despised. Hugh Laurie plays Mr Dick with wit, charm and empathy. Here’s an instance of a more enlightened attitude reaping dividends. (It’s not that Dickens treated Mr Dick’s mental disorder unsympathetically; rather, that screen portrayals of yesteryear have tended to present him too simply. The Oxford Companion to English Literature, as recently as its 1985 version edited by Margaret Drabble, termed Mr Dick ‘an amiable lunatic’ – and that’s how he has usually appeared.) Rosalind Eleazar (excellent in Kenneth Lonergan’s The Starry Messenger on the West End stage this summer) gives a deft, good-humoured performance as Agnes. Gwendoline Christie is a superb Jane Murdstone, ridiculous but richly intimidating.
As her brother, Darren Boyd is, alas, feeble. His Murdstone has the look of a mature male model and is a distinctly ineffectual tyrant: if this is what Iannucci wanted, it’s hard to see why. Aneurin Barnard’s narrow playing of Steerforth is more probably the result of the direction he received. Steerforth’s charisma is always invisible and his moral flaws are evident from the moment he appears. As Micawber, Peter Capaldi has some hard acts to follow: not just W C Fields in the 1935 Hollywood movie but also Arthur Lowe in the strong BBC television adaptation in 1974. I soon got bored with Capaldi’s different accents and busy theatricality.
Dev Patel is, as usual, eager and likeable. When David takes the stage at the start, there are tears in his eyes and his voice is choked with emotion. These suggest an intensity of feeling that rarely materialises in what follows. Patel does some skilful, amusing mimicry but he’s thoroughly lightweight – again, perhaps as intended. Iannucci doesn’t, for example, allow David even to react to Steerforth’s misdeeds. In the scheme of the film, he doesn’t need to: Steerforth’s entitlement, part and parcel of his social position, marks him out as a bad lot; his appeal to David and their mutual affection have to be subordinate to that. There is a convincing kinship between Patel’s David and Jairaj Varsani’s younger version of him. Varsani, who anticipates Patel’s humour, gives David a somewhat distracted quality. The sense he conveys of the little boy’s mind being on other things is an effective way of suggesting his inner world and imaginative potential.
The Personal History of David Copperfield has so far been well received by critics – and was very well received throughout by the audience in the Embankment Garden Cinema for this London Film Festival (LFF) screening. (The film had its European premiere as the LFF Opening Night Gala offering the previous evening.) Like Armando Iannucci’s last picture, The Death of Stalin (2017), this one is variously clever. Also like The Death of Stalin, it’s a cunning mixture of jocose and but-seriously. I find this vexingly manipulative but it clearly goes down a storm with many and the result looks bound to be a hit. Though I can’t help thinking something’s not quite right with a David Copperfield that makes you dread Micawber’s next appearance and root for Uriah Heep.
3 October 2019
