The Personal History of David Copperfield (Preview)
Reviewed by Graham Fuller

Produced by Armando Iannucci and Kevin Loader; directed by Armando Iannucci; screenplay by Simon Blackwell and Armando Iannucci, based on the novel The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account) by Charles Dickens; cinematography by Zac Nicholson; production design by Cristina Casali; costume design by Suzie Harman and Robert Worley; edited by Mick Audsley and Peter Lambert; music by Christopher Willis; starring Dev Patel, Jairaj Varsani, Morfydd Clark, Daisy May Cooper, Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Peter Capaldi, Rosalind Eleazar, Benedict Wong, Ben Whishaw, Darren Boyd, Gwendoline Christie, Aneurin Barnard, Paul Whitehouse, Anthony Welsh, Aimée Kelly, Rosaleen Linehan, and Bronagh Gallagher. Color, 119 min. A Searchlight Pictures release.

There are many reasons to praise Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s The Personal History of David Copperfield (1850), the eighth and most autobiographical of his fourteen completed novels and his favorite among them. Iannucci’s exuberant take on this classic Bildungsroman is doubly Dickensian—redolent of the author’s use of caricatures embedded with social meaning, and of the man himself at his most active and gregarious. David’s father has died before his birth and his beloved mother dies in his boyhood, leaving him adrift. Through his journey to adulthood, he experiences both kindness, from quasiguardians like his spiky aunt Betsey Trotwood and the jovial bankrupt Micawber, and cruelty from his rigid stepfather Mr. Murdstone. He searches for personal sovereignty and a watertight familial identity, expressing impatience when different names are foisted on him (“Trotwood Copperfield,” “Trot,” “Davidson,” “Daisy, “Doady”). The film seamlessly integrates Dickensian one-man showmanship; the part that acting (dear to Dickens) plays in everyday life; and cinema itself through the intermittent uses of partial rear projection and the accelerated speed of silent-film comedies—old-fashioned special effects that paradoxically render Dickens’s world more modern that it has appeared in other film and television adaptations of his work. 

Iannucci and co-writer Simon Blackwell streamlined Dickens’s narrative: the novel unfolds between 1820 and 1857; the film from 1841 to around 1867. David (Dev Patel) first appears as a twenty-something memoirist standing at a lectern onstage in front of a diverse audience to whom he will read the story of his life. This framing device draws on the public readings Dickens began in December 1853 when he was forty-one. The long flashback that comprises most of the movie begins with David haring from the lectern to his Suffolk family home, Blunderstone Rookery, which abuts the cemetery where his father is buried and where he waits with Aunt Betsey (Tilda Swinton) in the parlor as his mother Clara (Morfydd Clark) gives birth to him upstairs. The adult David materializes several times beside his younger self (Jairaj Varsani)—together they peer, for instance, through a window at David Copperfield Sr.’s grave. Such scenes indicate how memories are like films in which we see ourselves as actors on a long-vanished stage, and how the adult David, fond as he is of the little chap beside him, has sentimentalized and come to terms with his traumatic past. 

David Copperfield (Dev Patel) with his great-aunt, Betsey Trotwood and the strange Mr. Dick (Hugh Laurie), whom she protects.

Raised by his mother and the Copperfields’ devoted housekeeper Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper), David experiences an Edenic childhood until the saturnine businessman Murdstone (Darren Boyd) shows up to court Clara. Temporary relief comes when David accompanies Peggotty on a summer holiday to Yarmouth, where he is warmly welcomed at the beached upside-down boat in which her poor brother Mr. Peggotty (Paul Whitehouse) lives with his adopted niece Emily (Aimeé Kelly) and adopted nephew Ham (Anthony Welsh) and the comically pessimistic widow Mrs. Gummidge (Rosaleen Linehan).

Immediately after Ham and the unenthusiastic Emily get engaged (she ominously expresses a wish to start their married life far from the beach), a giant Monty Python hand (later revealed to be Murdstone’s) reaches through the roof of the upturned boat, plucks David from this idyll, and returns him to Blunderstone where he discovers Murdstone has married his mother and installed his “metallic” sister Jane (Gwendoline Christie) to partner him in his draconian oppression of his stepson. As Murdstone, the six foot four Boyd channels John Cleese as a ghoulish disciplinarian to sustain the Pythonesque absurdism, while the spectacle of the two white giants (Christie is six foot three) menacing Varsani’s tiny David smacks of domesticized imperialism. Murdstone punishes David for his defiance by sending him to work in the industrial hell of his London wine-bottling factory. Lodging with the shabbily genteel, permanently in-debt Mr. Micawber (Peter Capaldi) and his family, David (now played by Patel) sadly witnesses this new friend being sent to debtor’s prison (the fate also of Dickens’s father and the heroine’s father in Little Dorrit). After the Murdstones coldly inform David that his mother is dead and buried, he all but trashes the factory.

Copperfield and his newfound friend Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard).

Adopted by the protofeminist Betsey after she’s forgiven him for the crime of being born a boy and installed him in her Dover home, David befriends her likely autistic cousin and lodger Mr. Dick (Hugh Laurie), who, despite his literary bent, is unable to finish drafting his petition for houses for the laboring poor (a dab of Dickens the social reformer) because he’s bedeviled by involuntary thoughts of King Charles I’s severed head. This perseverative anxiety connotes Mr. Dick’s repressed traumas and possibly his Oedipal emasculation. Whereas the novel’s Mr. Dick habitually pastes fragments from incomplete versions of his memorial on his kite and experiences temporary liberation when he flies it, the film’s David coaches Mr. Dick to do this, as if he were a psychotherapist using a visual form of analysis with the same beneficial effect. Mr. Dick’s therapeutic process functions as an objective correlative to fellow writer David’s attempt to heal himself by describing his own traumatic journey before a rapt audience. 

Betsey introduces David to her bibulous financial advisor Mr. Wickfield (Benedict Wong) and his daughter Agnes (Rosalind Eleasar), who will long conceal her steadfast love for David. Betsey then enrolls him in the Wickfield-financed school for the education of young gentlemen where he meets two men—the disingenuously obsequious clerk Uriah Heep (Ben Whishaw) and the narcissistic fellow student Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard)—who will eventually test his mettle. As in the novel, there’s a homoerotic charge between David and Steerforth, its undercurrent the latter’s calculated assumption of masculine dominance. Hired as an agent by the proctor (attorney) Mr. Spenlow (Matthew Cottle), David reasserts his heterosexuality by falling in love with Spenlow’s daughter Dora (Morfydd Clark) who reciprocates his feelings. That Clark also plays David’s mother puts an Oedipal spin on David’s passion for the immature Dora, whose appeal can only be sexual—never stable ground for Dickens…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 1