Dev Patel, a David Copperfield for our Times – A Review

 

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The Personal History of David Copperfield

Dev Patel, a David Copperfield for our Times – A Review

Need some hope, need some laughter in hard times? Watch ‘The Personal History of David Copperfield’. This might sound counter-intuitive – because isn’t Charles Dickens about hardship and tragedy? Yes, there’s plenty of poverty and child labor and despair, cheats and charlatans, mean bullies and unfairness – times very like our own.

Yet there’s also hope, kindness and caring from unexpected quarters. And the fact that people can come together to oust a tyrant – yes, times very like our own. And always there’s humor – hardships seem to go down better with a nice chilled half-pint of wit.

 

‘The Personal History of David Copperfield’ is a modern take on Dickens’ classic – and again a tale for our times. One of the delights is that it’s a color-blind casting of old time England. David Copperfield, the English lad who grows up to be an author and a gentleman is no fair, blonde Englishman – it is our own much-loved Dev Patel, he of the tousled dark hair and Gujarati heritage. A dhokla eater like us! And yet Dev Patel is born to play David Copperfield.

He is David Copperfield.

“The opportunity to kind of exist in this world and obviously the joys of sitting in the back of a horse and carriage and wearing the top hat ignited this childlike glee inside of me,” admitted Dev Patel at a virtual press conference I attended with him and director Armando Iannucci who has chosen diverse actors to play roles they would not have got a few years back.

“I wanted as varied a cast as possible,” says Iannucci. “Dev was the only person I could think of and he was the first person I spoke to about it. I’m so relieved he said ‘Yes’ because I didn’t have a Plan B!”

Patel says that the color blind casting was a value add to the story  which can sometimes make the threads of the story even more potent: “I’ve never read the book and you know for me, Charles Dickens was something we were forced to read in school and I hate to say it but it was very bleak. Armando opened up the world, in terms of casting. It made it more representative of the Britain that I grew up in, and the opportunity for another young child not to miss out on this amazing tale because now they can really find a face that they can relate to on that screen.

And it’s not just about diversity – it’s like Charles Dickens himself was the kind of  writer for the everyman –  he would go out on stage and it was like going to watch a movie:  he would go and read big chapters of his book and it was meant for the masses. So by doing this I think it actually makes it more relevant and commercially viable to a wider audience.”

 

The effect of the film is to hook you totally – how can you not feel for a boy whose birth you saw, whom you followed through the many potholes of life, fatherless, then with the meanest stepfather who packs him off to the dismal child labor warehouses of London? A boy whose mother dies and he is told after the fact. When he wants to go to the funeral, he’s informed she’s already buried. Brick by brick is built up David’s resilience – ready for the next onslaught.

David Copperfield is given many weird names, treated as totally disposable, until he goes to live with his aunt   – and life changes. You almost heave a sigh of relief as if it’s your own life. The personal history is truly personal and you feel for Copperfield as you would for a real person- his troubles keep you enthralled and you really want to see him succeed.  What is engaging is his resourcefulness – somehow you know he will survive and thrive.

Dev Patel absolutely shines. His vulnerability and his sweet strength come out in every scene and you sense the steel which is within him- he is a survivor and that gives you hope for whatever life throws at him.

An Interview with Dev Patel and Armando Iannucci 

The working poor and the outlandishly rich are all a part of 19^th century London – just as they are today a part of our world, be it in Mumbai or New York. This is a story of teeming humanity and its hopes for a better future. As co-writer Simon Blackwell points out, “It deals with the need to find out who you are and to become who you’re meant to be.  It deals with love, and unrequited love, it deals with family, death and sex.  It deals with all those absolutely vital things that make us human.”

Color-blind casting across the board adds a contemporary edge to the tale and also keeps you mulling over your own pre-assumptions. Victorian England is full of remarkable faces and complex lives which are totally woven into the narrative. The characters are a delight – real people with their own idiosyncrasies. There are over 50 speaking parts in the film and it is populated with rich performances including from Tilda Swinton to Peter Capaldi to Hugh Laurie and Ben Whishaw, all creating memorable Dickensian characters.

By introducing against the grain casting of actors like Anthony Welsh, Nikki Amuka-Bird,  Benedict Wong and Rosalind Eleazar, Iannucci brings an immediacy and potency to the story.  “For me, and my skin color, I know that it’s so rare for me to play a character of this status in this period,” says Eleazar.

Indeed, it is going to powerful for people across racial barriers to see themselves on the big screen. Jairaj Varsani, who is 11 and plays the young David Copperfield, was born in London but has a mixed heritage of Gujrati, Tamil and Punjabi roots with ties to India and South Africa. It gives everyone a mirror to see themselves

Patel says, “What Armando has done is just make the world of Dickens even more available to a wider audience. I really think he’s looked at all these different actors and the energies they bring to these roles to capture the essence. It’s a true definition of color-blind casting. He’s just found the right person to embody that character and in doing so I think it’s made it far more authentic and accessible.”

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David Copperfield is more than anything a tale of positivity, of can-do grit. I personally liked David and Mr. Dick’s idea of a kite to fly away stressful thoughts – yes if we could just string them together on post-its  – and go fly a kite in the blue skies. A lovely concept and one which makes David Copperfield such an enjoyable excursion, along with the random kindnesses shown by unexpected characters.

There was great excitement among film fans when The Personal History of David Copperfield  was set to be released just before Covid-19 struck. Now half a year later as we still overcome the pandemic, It has become one of the first movies to be released in a theater and will slowly, hopefully take us back to normalcy. If David Copperfield could survive in 19^th century Dickens world, so can we in our equally chaotic modern times.

For Dev Patel fans, there’s something more to look forward to in the new color-blind acting world: Dev is all set to play Arthurian hero Sir Gawain in ‘The Green Knight’. According to Indiewire, some fans are already rooting for him to play the next James Bond!  With Dev Patel, anything is possible!

 

(The Personal History of David Copperfield opens in over 1,000 theaters across US/Canada tomorrow, Friday August 28, wherever movie theaters have reopened.)

  Armando Iannucci on Charles Dickens as Mass Entertainer

 For Armando Iannucci, of  In the Loop, The Thick of it and Veep, The Personal History of David Copperfield is his third feature film. In 2012, he wrote and starred in the BBC TV special Armando’s Tale of Charles Dickens, a re-evaluation of the author “without the Victorian seriousness.”

“I always admired Dickens because he was a mass entertainer – he was the most famous writer in the world at the age of 24 or 25. He wrote weekly novels – he didn’t write them in one burst he published them, a section every week. And he was aware of his big popular audience, and yet not afraid to use that massive stage he was on to talk about things that were uncomfortable to talk about – things like factory labor, child labor, violence in schools and injustice in the legal system, housing, poverty, all these things, and yet keep it very rooted in reality, an intimate characterization, and also celebrate life and community.

I didn’t think I’d ever be actually adapting a Dickens novel as a movie. But it was rereading of that I realized actually there’s a lot more to him than has been conveyed in adaptations.  I think we have this image of him as being a long-winded Victorian novelist who writes about mountain fog and death. In fact, he’s really very, very funny. And I was determined in this adaptation to bring out the comedy that was there in the book.”

Armando Iannucci’s “The Personal History of David Copperfield” has a Dickensian knack for gratifying popular taste while yanking the audience toward emotional truth. The New Yorker