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white_hartFor someone with a degree in English literature, I have read very little Dickens (A Christmas Carol, obviously; A Tale of Two Cities; Great Expectations; Bleak House) and apart from a passionate admiration for Sydney Carton's heroic redemption which means I still know quite a lot of that final chapter by heart, I've never been a huge fan. This meant that, while I knew the names of a lot of the characters in David Copperfield, in the way the names of Dickens characters so often do seem terribly familiar despite being entirely divorced from context, I went into Armando Ianucci's new film version with absolutely no idea of the actual plot of the novel. (Checking Wikipedia, this may have been a good thing, as it appears that Ianucci has done a lot of adapting, conflating two separate school episodes into one, reordering events and changing the fates of some characters.)
The film stars Dev Patel as David Copperfield, heading an admirably diverse cast which also includes Peter Capaldi, Hugh Laurie and Tilda Swinton. Condensing the novel down to under two hours means the plot rattles along at a cracking pace, and while it also means that there's no time for the huge cast of characters to become anything but caricatures, well, this is Dickens, so they probably wouldn't have managed it even if this had been an epic TV series rather than a film. Visually, it's rather lovely in a Tourist Board kind of way, all sunshine and rolling green fields and very clean CGI historical streets. I felt that it did rather underplay the episodes of misery and deprivation in David's life and came across as much more of a cheerful romp than any kind of social commentary, but it was an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours escaping reality on a January evening.
The film stars Dev Patel as David Copperfield, heading an admirably diverse cast which also includes Peter Capaldi, Hugh Laurie and Tilda Swinton. Condensing the novel down to under two hours means the plot rattles along at a cracking pace, and while it also means that there's no time for the huge cast of characters to become anything but caricatures, well, this is Dickens, so they probably wouldn't have managed it even if this had been an epic TV series rather than a film. Visually, it's rather lovely in a Tourist Board kind of way, all sunshine and rolling green fields and very clean CGI historical streets. I felt that it did rather underplay the episodes of misery and deprivation in David's life and came across as much more of a cheerful romp than any kind of social commentary, but it was an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours escaping reality on a January evening.
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Date: 2020-01-31 12:09 pm (UTC)We going to see '1917' this evening.
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Date: 2020-01-31 07:34 pm (UTC)