Well. That was... different.
To be honest, I didn't think I would like Armando Iannucci's adaptation of David Copperfield at all, and when I first heard about it and saw the trailer I debated whether it would even make a good subject for a blog post. In some instances it is really better to heed Thumper's father's advice: "If you can't say anything good, don't say anything at all". But as my local cinema actually aired the film (it's not making any profit anyway), it seemed foolish not to see it. And in some respects it was a pleasant surprise. I doubt it will ever be a true Dickens fan's favourite adaptation of the novel, but if you take it on its own terms it can be quite entertaining.
Let's address the Indian elephant in the room. One of the things that made me sceptical towards the film was that Iannucci and Co. seemed to have carried diversity casting to unnecessary extremes. Now, I understand why film and TV makers are tempted to change the ethnicity of some of the characters in adaptations of classic novels. I don't think it should be mandatory or anything, but if it means a first-rate actor gets the chance to sink his or her teeth into a part they would otherwise not have been considered for, I'm ready to roll with it. However, ethnic switches (as I call them) should preferably be done for characters whose back story can be tweaked to accommodate the change. (Or whose back story already fits perfectly, as with Tattycoram in the BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit.) A David of Indian descent is actually not out of the question if you make his mother an Indian bride (which Iannucci doesn't, by the way). But characters like Mrs Steerforth or the Wickfields, whose well-entrenched privileges play an important role in the story, seem odd choices for an ethnic switch.
What bugged me even more was that there wasn't any inner logic to the casting - children and parents were cast without any consideration to whether they could convincingly be related. I'd rather not go through a film seriously doubting the virtue of the late Mrs Wickfield. Leaving skin tones aside, I was miffed that Peter Capaldi - one of my favourite actors - had been cast as a non-bald Mr Micawber (not exactly one of my favourite Dickens characters). Ben Whishaw as Uriah sounded dandy, but couldn't they have bothered to put a red wig on him?
In the end, the eccentric casting choices mattered less to me than I thought they would, as the whole film leans heavily towards the surreal. The framing device is that David, as an author, is reading out of an autobiographical novel to a theatre of enthusiastic fans, much in the style of Dickens's own public readings. From the theatre, we enter into the narration, and the story we witness is the one of David's life as he himself sees it and has written it up. This means we can't be sure if what we see is what actually happened - it's filtered through David's imagination. The film plays around a bit with this conceit, but not too much. When we first see Peggotty's boat-house it's in vibrant colour, but when David visits it again with Steerforth it's quite drab, much to his consternation.
While the story starts out familiarly enough, events soon start to diverge from the novel, and the film becomes more of a jumble of characters and themes from the book than an adaptation. Creakle is the manager of the bottle factory where young David finds himself rather than a headmaster, and his school has been dispensed with. David doesn't escape the factory until he's a youth, and doesn't meet Steerforth until he attends a gentleman's school as a young man, which makes his blind devotion less forgiveable. Mrs Steerforth and Rosa Dartle are blended into one character. At one time, David and his aunt and Mr Dick and all the Micawbers live in one slum apartment owned by Uriah. Stephen Blackpool might have called it a muddle.
I suppose I should object to anyone being so free and easy with Dickens, but one reason I feel indulgent towards this approach is that I realise a simple retelling of the book in a film format would probably not have worked. David Copperfield the novel is huge, and would benefit from getting the epic series treatment accorded to Bleak House and Little Dorrit by the BBC many, many years ago now. With a series of several episodes, scenes and characters usually cut could have been included and the story could have gained depth. As it is, David Copperfield is usually adapted as a mini-series, which means the adaptations tend to get predictable, showing the same whistle-stop tour of memorable scenes. With a film, you have even less time on your hands. One solution is to find an angle on the source material and go with that.
This is what Iannucci has chosen to do, and to be fair, the angle works well. The recurring theme of the film is David's writing, and whenever we see Dev Patel's David discovering words and phrases, writing them down, being impressed by strong characters he meets and "acting them out" when he makes them into writing material (again, much like Dickens), I was more or less riveted. Patel is excellent as David, who is allowed to be more of a personality than is usual when David Copperfield is adapted.
There are still many things in this film I didn't care for. Perhaps the most serious criticism I have is that for a film that elects to go for pythonesque farce as often as this one does, it's not particularly funny. Few of the jokes land, and some of the running jokes are downright puzzling (what's with Mrs Heep and her heavy cakes?). Moreover, even if you have a light-hearted approach, there are some things - such as Mr Wickfield's drinking - that really shouldn't be played for laughs. Dora is supposed to be silly, true (though a pet theory of mine is that she's not as stupid as everyone thinks) but she's downright subnormal here. None of the characters except David (and possibly Mr Dick) are accorded much of an inner life - they're mostly just a gallery of oddballs.
Still, there were little things I liked - and enough of them to make a sort of critical mass in the film's favour. Such as how Tungay (whose parrotting of Creakle's words is otherwise dragged out too long) gets ahead of himself and blurts out "she's dead" when David is told of his mother's demise, and Creakle is still on the "very seriously ill" stage. It's probably just a blunder, but can be seen as small act of mercy towards David, cutting short the agonisingly drawn-out delivery of the bad news. Or how the thoughts that assail Mr Dick when he's in one of his "King Charles's head" moods are actually thoughts relevant to Charles I's life and state of mind. Or how neatly Dora disappears from the picture without having to die: when she sees how awkwardly she fits into a rendition of the Uriah confrontation scene, where David has written her in as a character, she realises that this goes for the whole of their relationship. "Write me out, Doady", she pleads, "I really don't fit". In the film, Ham, while still risking his life to try to save Steerforth, actually survives the storm, and I found myself thinking "I wish Dickens would have gone with that".
Ben Whishaw is great as Uriah as expected; he's at his best when bitter rather than cringing (and with reason, too: everyone is horrible to him in his 'umble days, including Agnes, long before he becomes a threat to her family). I would say, though, that the most memorable performance aside from Patel's is that of Hugh Laurie as Mr Dick. He is not the least bit as I imagine Mr Dick from the novel, but the scenes with his mournful philosopher of a madman hold the attention, and his comic timing is impeccable.
Not even a film full of surrealism, however, can convince me that Peter Capaldi is Mr Micawber.
