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The Personal History of David Copperfield, review: Armando Iannucci's rollicking farce keeps the spirit of Dickens intact

Dev Patel stars in The Personal History of David Copperfield
Dev Patel stars in The Personal History of David Copperfield

Dir: Armando Iannucci. Cast: Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, Jairaj Varsani, Hugh Laurie, Ben Whishaw, Peter Capaldi, Daisy May Cooper, Paul Whitehouse, Rosalind Eleazar, Aneurin Barnard, Morfydd Clark, Benedict Wong. Cert: PG. Time: 119 min.

“Like many fond parents,” Charles Dickens wrote a few years before he died, “I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.” Dickens’s affection for his eighth novel surely stemmed in part from the fact that its hero’s story ran close to his own. Both toiled in factories as children, fell in love with pretty young women above their station, eventually made their livings from words, and had fathers, or father-figures, who struggled with debt. For two men of letters, it feels apt that each one’s initials were the other’s mirror image.

This rollicking new screen adaptation from master satirist Armando Iannucci suggests what Dickens himself might have felt while piecing together his manuscript: that our best hope of making sense of life is writing it down. The Personal History of David Copperfield barrels along like a farce, with characters bustling in and out like guests in the Fawlty Towers lobby. David himself – adorably played as a boy by Jairaj Varsani and with consummate sparkle and charm as a young man by Dev Patel – could almost be hovering behind reception, the unflappable Polly trying to keep track of the comings and goings.

You’d be hard pressed to draw up a more pleasing guest list. Tilda Swinton brings a shiver of surrealism to the eccentric Betsey Trotwood. Ben Whishaw’s Uriah Heep is a kind of a wilted leek in human form. Peter Capaldi brings a disheveled nobility to Mr Micawber that calls to mind the great Alastair Sim. And Hugh Laurie is just treasurable as the scatterbrained Mr Dick.

Faced with this lot, David is inspired to write – so write he does, jotting down quotes and observations on scraps of paper that he will later piece together into the “Personal History” of the title. He is continually being defined by the nicknames others bestow on him: to Betsey Trotwood he’s Trot, a generic descendent, while Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard), his worldly wise schoolmate, sees him as a delicate Daisy. To his beloved Dora (Morfydd Clark), meanwhile, he’s Doady: a cute pet to be snuggled, like her lapdog Jip. It’s only through his own words that David is able to explain to the world – and himself – who he actually is.

Ingeniously, the film opens at this very moment: a public reading of David’s autobiography. But through a series of playful cuts, the theatre and the audience fall away, and he is back in rural Suffolk, striding up to Blunderstone Rookery to witness his own birth. And notably, Patel’s mother – also played by Clark, in an intriguing piece of double casting – is white.

Yes, the ensemble cast has enough multicultural credentials to give Laurence Fox a fit of the vapours. The effect is jarring, but pleasantly so – who wouldn’t want a film culture enriched with Rosalind Eleazar’s forbearing yet impish Agnes, Nikki Amuka-Bird’s imperious Mrs Steerforth, or Benedict Wong’s sozzled Mr Wickfield? And while Iannucci stops short of using it to explore the book’s themes in new ways – David’s precarious social standing isn’t connected to his South Asian heritage, for instance – it brings a new vibrancy and commotion to the period drama palette.

So too does Iannucci and Simon Blackwell’s screenplay, which trims away extraneous characters and subplots with such aerodynamic finesse, the script feels like it might have been tested in a wind tunnel. Barkis is gone but somehow doesn’t feel missing; other favourite characters’ catchphrases have been cut – even Micawber’s famous recipe for happiness – but their spirits are boisterously intact.

The 170-year-old text is also skilfully sifted for new grace notes: David’s description of the print in a schoolbook “[putting] skates on, and [skimming] away from me with a smoothness there was no checking” is depicted here as dyslexia. The new jokes are worthy of the source material too: Dickens would have surely chuckled at Agnes’s description of Heep as someone whose interpersonal skills suggest “he lives in your nose and is keen to get home.”

Few would have anticipated such warmth and playfulness at this moment from the director of The Death of Stalin and creator of The Thick of It, the most excoriating political satire of the age. But there is something wonderfully unexpected – and dare I even say subversive? – in responding to our fraught times with a film in which wit and goodness win through in the end.

The Personal History of David Copperfield is in UK cinemas now