Deborah Ross

Fun and likeable and forgettable: The Personal History of David Copperfield reviewed

Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield is a romp told at a lick, and while it’s fun and likeable with fantastic casting — Hugh Laurie as Mr Dick is especially sublime — it is not particularly immersive or memorable. It’s 600 pages squashed into just under two hours so it’s bound to feel more like CliffsNotes (or SparkNotes or York Notes, depending on your era), rather than the real deal. I have nothing against CliffsNotes (or similar), by the way — I loved its synopsis of The Mayor of Casterbridge so much at A-level that I never bothered with the actual book; I did OK — but you still know you are getting the bare bones rather than anything richer or deeper.

600 pages squashed into just under two hours is bound to feel like CliffsNotes rather than the real deal

Here, Dev Patel stars as Copperfield and there is colour-blind casting throughout, which is excellent, particularly as it will infuriate some people (i.e. the white ones who are still determined to hang on to everything). Iannucci directs, and also co-wrote with Simon Blackwell, his collaborator on The Thick of It and Veep, but this has less smarts that you might imagine. Mostly, it’s faithful, in its truncated way, with the occasional visual conceit thrown in.

For instance, we are introduced to Copperfield at a lectern in front of a rapt crowd as he reads from his autobiography, then the film bursts through the backdrop of the stage and rewinds to the circumstances of his birth. On another occasion, a giant hand reaches down to swiftly move Copperfield from one place to another in a way that says: yes, we know we are doing this at a lick. So that is smart as well as meta — fair play — but incidents and characters come and go so furiously fast it is hard to care.

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