The Personal History of David Copperfield
Director: Armando Iannucci
Filming Dickens is at once a gift and a challenge. A gift because he was such a visual storyteller, putting the reader right in front of those characters and making us see the rooms, the streets, the city or the fields they moved through. A challenge, because there’s so damned much of it. His roving eye never missed anything, and he wouldn’t describe in a paragraph something he could spin out, brilliantly, exhaustively, for pages on end.
Armando Iannucci has done a good job of compressing David Copperfield (Dickens’ own favourite among his novels) into two hours, though what gets lost isn’t always in his control. He sets a lively pace. We find David (Dev Patel, pictured) hurrying through scenes of his early life (very early: his own birth) and memorising them for later: this Copperfield is an author surrogate, writing at his desk in front of a mirror just as Dickens did. The switch from country to city to coast and back is breathless, and characters come round like prancing horses on a carousel – his beloved nurse, Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper), impecunious Micawber (Peter Capaldi), eccentric Aunt Betsey (Tilda Swinton) and her soft-headed protégé Mr Dick (Hugh Laurie).