The Personal History of David Copperfield

The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020)
Director: Armando Iannucci
Actors: Dev Patel, Hugh Laurie, Peter Capaldi

Synopsis: David Copperfield (Dev Patel) is a young boy cast out into a harsh Victorian world when his widow of a mother marries a brutal man who essentially banishes David. Over the course of his young life, David flits between moments of happiness and tragedy as an array of colourful characters swirl around his affairs. David’s processing of his own identity through his writing becomes a feature of his life too.

Review: Armando Iannucci’s attempt to bring to life in a novel way one of the finest pieces of literature in the English language is an honourable attempt, although, in the end, Iannucci overreaches himself with the idiosyncratic elements he tries to incorporate and through the sheer difficulty in condensing a dense narrative into a two-hour feature film format.

One of the biggest disappointments is Iannucci’s inability to develop the autobiographical conceit that frames the narrative and that he carries beautifully into the opening moments of the film. The novel is, after all, a retrospective narration, and Iannucci seems to be cleverly honouring that through Patel’s grown-up David reading out and performing that story to a packed theatre, before he literally enters that narrative and ghosts around the early events of his life. The poignancy of your older self being able to pay silent homage to the events of your life strikes at the heart of the novel’s power, but Iannucci strangely jettisons this almost immediately until the film’s end.

Also, Iannucci makes strange elisions to the novel that take away from the force of the ‘David Copperfield’ narrative. Clearly, some abbreviations and edits had to take place, but Iannucci makes the wrong ones. The harsh boarding school and bottle factory to where Copperfield is sent are merged into an incoherent whole that diminishes the impact of both places, (spoiler alert) Ham doesn’t die in the Steerforth storm episode which undercuts the profundity and import of that moment which is, incidentally, one of the finest chapters in English literature, and Dora’s death is skipped over. Iannucci makes a clever decision (à la Peter Kosminsky with Juliette Binoche’s two Cathys in Wuthering Heights, 1992) by using the same actor in two key roles – Morfydd Clark is both David’s mother and later wife – but, having done that, it’s essential that we see him losing both of these vulnerable figures to perceive the cyclical sadness from which David struggles to escape.

And it’s this sense that Iannucci’s decisions have seen him lose the novel’s dramatic power that restricts its overall effect. Some commentators are counter-arguing this lack of emotion by pinning a meek ‘absurdist’ auteur reading on Iannucci’s adaptation. But, again, that seems a shallow tack, as he’s filming in a conventional televisual style what were merely eccentricities within the narrative such as the characterisations of Mr Micawber and Mr Dick. Incidentally, compared to my two favourite adaptations of this novel – the 1969 film version with the likes of Ralph Richardson, Corin Redgrave and Laurence Olivier, and the underrated 1999 BBC TV serial which I think is the seminal adaptation featuring stellar work from Bob Hoskins, Maggie Smith and Trevor Eve to name but a few – the characterisations here fail to hit the mark. Iannucci favourite Peter Capaldi is too aggressive and lacks the geniality and lightness of touch of a Ralph Richardson or Bob Hoskins as Mr Micawber, and game performers like Tilda Swinton and Ben Whishaw seem neutered in their roles as Betsey Trotwood and Uriah Heep respectively.

It feels remiss not to pass comment on the film’s colourblind racial casting. I have no issue with it per se, and I like the fact no narrative credence is given to the race of the actor – he/she is the character, and no backstory is invented to justify the character’s ethnicity. That said, I don’t feel it adds anything either. It’s not absurdist, and it has no historical import as an act of sly re-appropriation, because there’s no real post-colonial mileage in the story. It’s perhaps emblem of the film’s slightly empty co-opting of novelistic tactics for little discernible rhetorical or emotional effect. (January 2020)