Review 2 – The Personal History of David Copperfield
„As a writer and director of motion pictures, Armando Iannucci has so far stuck to the absurd brutality of politics, both the modern day, lightly fictionalized kind (In the Loop) and the historical kind (The Death of Stalin). These are every-man-for-himself stories in which human lives are used like poker chips. And so an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield would seem like a dire departure for him. How could Iannucci’s ruthless wit survive the romance, the whimsy and, above all, the sentimentality of Dickens? Happily, not only is The Personal History of David Copperfield a triumph, it may also have more of Iannucci himself in it than anything he’s made yet.
Dev Patel plays Copperfield (Jairaj Varsani plays him in early, childhood scenes), a curious Englishman whose tumultuous life takes him from being a noblewoman’s son to being a child laborer in a factory and from a tony boarding school to a rotting tenement. But his ultimate fate, which the film recognizes from the beginning, is to become a successful novelist.”
