Score: 4.5 / 5
This is the way Dickens should always be done.
First: It's unexpected. Sure, a realistic period piece is good now and again, but if we wanted to slog through messy class hierarchies and a comedy of manners in Victorian social strictures, we could just read the book. I personally find Dickens torturous to read, his prose jokingly turns on itself, repeating ideas and phrases ad nauseam, literalizing everything to the point where even the stories themselves feel farcical. While we can applaud the man for giving us some of the most iconic, grotesque characters in Western literature -- indeed, the entire Dickensian low-Gothic subgenre, as I consider his legacy -- I just can't stand his wretched prose. But director Armando Iannucci has here revitalized it into the comic brilliance it is, at its core. Not unlike adding vaudevillian music to Oliver Twist and creating the perennial theatrical favorite, this adaptation injects color and humor and style into a tired old story that, otherwise, would simply have no life left to it.
Second: It's delightful. Cutting out the boring, prosaic heft of Dickens's text, Iannucci and his co-writer Simon Blackwell here carve out only the crucial nuggets of story. Using incredible visual shorthand to convey loads of information to us, they have utterly stripped bare the classic and rebuilt it with every intention to cater artistically to an unfamiliar audience (and even a jaded one). Vibrant colors and fabrics adorn likeable, talented stars. Gorgeous and expansive production design immerse us in a grounded but fabulous world. I'd liken this closely to this year's Emma., which preys on similar aesthetic desires for hilariously awkward, densely colorful stylizations. Editing follows deliberately broken, theatrical logic much as it did in Joe Wright's Anna Karenina (2012), here perhaps all the more successful as a result of connected themes of creation and artistry. Copperfield, after all, like an actor, is a man who goes by many names hoping to become a successful artist.
Third: It literalizes themes I only grasped tangentially in the novel. Making Copperfield the actual narrator of his own story -- in the beginning, speaking his life to an audience before turning and witnessing his own birth upstage -- before revealing that his own life story becomes his first major work of literature is a beautiful way to frame discussions of memory and art, imagination and recollection, and how the ways we tell stories sometimes matter more than the stories. Creativity and creation go hand-in-hand for these characters, much as they do for the production crew of this piece, and in a year of impoverished artists and audiences, we would do well to remind ourselves of the joys inherent in silly theatricality.
Finally: This might be the first movie based on a classic work of Western literature I've ever seen that features truly colorblind casting. Well, except Disney's 1997 Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella. And while I'm sure there was some small intentionality involved, I found myself wondering time and again when race or ethnicity would become an unexpected part of the story or theme or characterization. And it never does. It's amazing. It's almost like a community theatre production that casts whoever is right for the part instead of making any statements about it. It's brilliant. This is pure, unadulterated British filmmaking that uses BBC regulars like Peter Capaldi and Hugh Laurie next to such dynamic stars as Tilda Swinton and Dev Patel. Benedict Wong and Rosalind Eleazar are the Wickfields, and that tells you all you need to know. Brilliant.
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