The Personal History of David Copperfield (international)
LIONSGATECharles Dickens is, without a doubt, the most adapted author in history and could maybe only yield to William Shakespeare, if one were to include playwrights in this contest. In combination with the fact his eponymous works are consistently used as stellar examples of narrative storytelling in schools and universities the world over, the sheer volume of adaptations in various guises (film, stage, ballet, musicals, radio plays, etc.) have elevated Dickens – and the bulk of his literary output – to the echelon of cultural archetypes. Everyone, even those who had never read a single novel of his, can probably imagine what Oliver Twist is about, conjure imagery evoking Victorian times or perhaps even draw an associative bond to the character of Fagin as portrayed by Sir Alec Guinness in David Lean’s adaptation. Charles Dickens is an immovable icon; he is immortal.
“Da liegt der Hund begraben”, as the German proverb goes, this is where the problem is: how is anyone supposed to adapt any of Dickens’s works in this day and age? In fact, having considered the vast body of evidence of already existing attempts – and it has to be noted that at any given point in time, the probability of someone somewhere working on an adaptation of The Great Expectations is always greater than zero – one can clearly extract two distinct trends: adapting verbatim with strict adherence to the period and the source material, or abandoning it completely and either transplanting the narrative into a new genre convention or re-shaping its narrative musculature to look more modern (e.g. Scrooged).
Instead of swinging towards any of these two extremes, Armando Iannucci – who re-teamed for this film with his long-standing collaborator Simon Blackwell – strove to find some kind of middle ground between them. He imagined re-telling the widely acclaimed semi-autobiographical coming-of-age masterpiece David Copperfield so as to capitalise on the charm of the period setting and frolic in the lavish costuming and production design while spicing up the source material and giving it a thoroughly modern edge. What is more, he would also opt to imbue the story, with occasional instances of magical absurdism peeking through the veneer of Victorian stiffness, as well as openly dancing the cha-cha atop of the fourth wall. Together, these notions give Iannucci’s The Personal History Of David Copperfield a unique cinematic flavour, which is closest in spirit to what this film would have been in the hands of someone like Terry Gilliam. However, these seemingly modern ideas of blending reality with fiction, gently warping the camera’s perspective or retaining a modicum of elevated self-awareness can be – at the very least, partially – traced back to Dickens himself. After all, heavily influenced by the author’s real-life experiences as the novel was, it was “a very complicated weaving of truth and invention”, to quote the man himself. Iannucci simply applied a secondary layer of meta-interpretation onto an already engineered source material. And, boy, did he do so with panache and flair!
But none of this would be possible without a formidable ensemble cast capable of reducing to practice this madly clever and strategically hilarious interpretation of David Copperfield. Alongside heavyweights such as Tilda Swinton, Peter Capaldi and Hugh Laurie, whose casting falls in the category of expected in the context of the source material being adapted, he hired an insanely diverse cast of actors with Dev Patel in the titular role, Rosalind Eleazar, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Benedict Wong and others. But contrary to what one might be inclined to think, this isn’t a calculated attempt at enforcing representation or some kind of cynical virtue signalling meant to score brownie points with the demographic at which this movie is aiming. Instead, this choice is more likely to have been dictated by the desire to embrace the timelessness of the source material. It is as though Iannucci wanted to emphasise that it doesn’t matter what ethnicity these characters are, despite the fact they have been persistently depicted in one rigid manner. Although they are based on real people who Dickens knew, they are equally figments of his imagination. They are not real people! They are cultural archetypes! They are memes, ideas! And ideas are colourless.
The film drives this point home effortlessly, solely on the basis of it never being paid attention to. Unorthodox as it may be in its highly progressive stance, Iannucci’s rendition of David Copperfield thus becomes much more than a gimmicky attempt at adapting a well-worn novel. It is a refreshing and snappy merger of modern sensibilities of comedy with the spirit of the original novel – which these days, all too often becomes drowned by obsessive attention to period accuracy – which also happens to be an important milestone in the way films are made. While it is not the first movie to challenge the status quo of what conservative audiences have grown to see as traditional, The Personal History Of David Copperfield is arguably one of the most successful in de-politicising diversity and splicing it organically into the film’s genetic code. Also to add to this growing heap of praise, it is yet another piece of evidence to show that Armando Iannucci is one the foremost voices in modern comedy, who can take material as stale and worn out as this one and turn it into an irreverent rollercoaster of laughter and absurdity underpinned by genuine human emotion.
