119 min | PG | August 28, 2020 | Searchlight Pictures
Armando Iannucci turns Dickens loose and lets Dev Patel sprint through a life that keeps reinventing itself. Orphans, swindlers, and eccentrics pile up around him. The result is a Victorian novel that moves like it just had three espressos.
David Copperfield narrates his own life and rewrites it as he goes. He is a writer assembling the people who shaped him, and the film knows that memory is a kind of authorship. Dev Patel plays the adult David moving through his own childhood scenes, watching himself, sometimes stepping into the frame to grab a remembered word. The story runs from a happy infancy through cruelty, poverty, factory labor, and a slow climb back toward something like belonging. Underneath the comic energy, the film is about a man deciding which version of himself to keep.
Dev Patel plays David with restless physical charm and a writer’s hunger for the right phrase. He gives the character a forward lean, always chasing the next scene before it arrives. Tilda Swinton plays Betsey Trotwood as a brittle aunt at war with the donkeys on her lawn, and she lands every clipped line with conviction. Hugh Laurie plays Mr. Dick as a gentle man tangled in his own thoughts, building kite messages out of a beheaded king. Peter Capaldi plays Micawber as a perpetual debtor whose optimism never dents, and Ben Whishaw plays Uriah Heep as a creature of false humility that curdles into menace.
Iannucci directs and co-writes with Simon Blackwell, and the two treat Dickens as a sprint rather than a march. The standout choice is the staging of memory itself. Scenes get projected onto walls and bedsheets, characters peel a backdrop away to reveal the next location, and David literally writes lines of dialogue as people speak them. Zac Nicholson’s cinematography keeps the palette bright and the camera mobile, which matches the colorblind casting and the refusal to treat the period with stuffy reverence. The editing cuts fast and trusts the audience to keep pace with the time jumps.
This is a Dickens adaptation that values energy over weight. The pace that makes the film exhilarating also flattens the darker chapters before they can settle. The factory and the debtors’ prison flash past, and the cruelty registers as incident rather than wound. Iannucci builds a warm, inventive, genuinely funny machine, and it earns its joy without quite earning its sorrow.