The Personal History of David Copperfield 2019
I never read the book, but this movie got good reviews, so I wound up buying a digital copy with some credits I had. I was disappointed with this movie. I was so unfamiliar with the story I didn’t realize that Uriah Heep, the band, got their name from a character in this book, so it was all new to me. I suspect some of my issues with the movie relate back to the source material and some also with this adaptation. Charles Dickens wrote many of his books as serials in magazines, so they are a collection of episodes, rather than a focused story. In this case you see bits of the life of David Copperfield, from his birth to a widow, and then a rough upbringing. There are so many characters, and while there are a few recognizable stars like Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, and Dev Patel, most of the rest of the giant cast were presented as if they should be familiar and just were not. To make things more confusing, they were completely colorblind on casting, which I think is a nice idea, except a Chinese guy has a daughter who is black (and it wasn’t clear to me that she was his daughter; I thought she was his wife). And a black woman has a very white son. That’s nice, and didn’t matter usually, but it threw me off, thinking it is some kind of clue and it just isn’t. I feel like maybe the director just assumed everyone would already know the characters from this famous work and could present them however he wanted. Not all of the episodes really contribute much to the overall story and then parts of the story that maybe should be fleshed out more get squeezed down too much. It can’t be easy to slim down a Dickens tome stuffed with stories and characters into two hours, but the movie suffers as a result. It was both hurried and yet still kind of boring with a lot of familiar tropes that don’t add much. Perhaps these ingredients are so familiar because everyone has copied Dickens (even Dickens), but the movie should still find a way to say something new. The movie tries to be clever and whimsical, but generally fails at both, which seems like bad writing and directing. They do make a pretty good effort to praise Copperfield’s way with words, and therefore Dickens' own words (I would think), in what turns out to be the story of a writer with a life very similar to that of Dickens. Of course, another common trope in movies is the story of an upcoming writer …
It seems like sometimes things are being forced. For instance, as a young man Copperfield is sent to a school to become a gentlemen. He is asked by a snooty adult about his family and instead of saying who they are (were), he just says they have died. Supposedly his mother was “a lady” and his aunt definitely has money since she is paying to send him to school, so why not mention them? Did you lose credit if you parents died? I can see how he needs to cover up the fact that he worked in a factory as a kid instead of having nannies and going to private school, but the family part seemed like something he didn’t have to make up.
This isn’t a bad movie, it just isn’t that good. Still, I think big fans of the genre who can enjoy sort of stuffy humor, or humor based mostly on wry performances, could be happy with the result.
Written: 30 Aug 2022
Owned on: Digital