The Personal History Of David Copperfield (2020)

REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER

The bile and low scores (1/10s) directed at Armando Iannucci’s winningly fresh take on DAVID COPPERFIELD is mostly thinly disguised racism from idiots taking exception to the “colourblind” casting. Ianucci goes all in on this, casting actors for roles in his film without any regard to race or color.

So we get Nikki Amuka-Bird as class-wingnut Mrs Steerforth, with her son James played by Aneurin Barnard; and Rosalind Eleazar playing daughter Agnes to Benedict Wong as her father, Mr Wickfield. It all adds to the dazzle and reinvention.

Everybody is excellent in the film; every cast member comes out well. Ben Wishaw is perfectly unctuous and calculating as Uriah Heep; Tilda Swinton’s sometimes wilful idiosyncrasies play nicely into her Aunt Trotwood.

It’s great to see Hugh Laurie being funny again on screen. He plays Mr Dick - a man who came to believe he had taken in the thoughts of Charles 1st once the king had been beheaded - with comic panache and just the right touch of vulnerability.

Dev Patel is a charming and accessible David Copperfield, with Iannucci using the framing device of the writer giving a theatre reading of his novel to bring home the autobiographical aspects of Dicken’s book.

The film tries to pack in a lot of the story. It mostly succeeds but does burst at the seams occasionally.

Virginia Woolf once wrote that Dickens, when he found himself in a narrative dead end, simply pitched more characters onto the fire. One of my favourite scenes in the film slyly addresses this. 

Dora, played by the Swedish/Welsh actress Morfydd Clark, the woman Copperfield loves and will marry, finds herself in the climactic confrontation with Uriah Heep but then suddenly announces she shouldn’t be there. She’s right. Her character wasn’t involved in the lead up to the confrontation, but there are so many characters crowding Heep that we had lost count of who was there and who wasn’t. It’s a meta moment that pays off shortly afterwards when she walks into Copperfield’s little writing office, where he is penning his novel (the one adapted into the film we are watching). She loves him and he loves her, but they have no need for each other. She asks if she might hold his pens while he writes. He obliges, and continues with his writing. She stands for a few minutes, holding the pens, but soon recognises it is a silly, worthless task. She tells him she really should not be there and he should write her out of his book. She backs out of the room and we never see her again. It’s an extraordinary moment that I found very moving.

The Personal History Of David Copperfield is full of such extraordinary moments and manages to retain the social commentary Dickens ran through his work.

I thought it was breezy and brilliant. Its run in the cinemas brought down by the pandemic that emerged shortly after its release.