If you thought Greta Gerwig's version of "Little Women" was radical wait until you see Armando Iannuci's "The Personal History of David Copperfield" which isn't so much an adaptation of Dickens' novel as a complete reworking and overhaul of it. This is Dickens as you've never seen him before with Dev Patel cast as David and a whole host of black and Asian actors cast in subsidiary roles with no obvious logic in the casting and it works magnificently. This is racial diversity at its most sublime; I wonder why no-one thought of it before.
Of course, that's only half of it. Iannuci's triumph is in his tinkering with the work in ways that are both highly cinematic and theatrical. It opens with an adult David addressing an audience in a theatre before moving through the backdrop into the story proper much in the same way Olivier did in his "Henry V". He attends his own birth; he's a boy David, (played by Jairaj Varsani), before becoming an adult before his time. Iannuci introduces the characters in David's life in a pell-mell fashion and leaves out others. If the film has a fault it's that Iannuci simply flies through it. No-one pauses for breath but I just didn't want it to stop.The casting is sublime. Patel is Oscar-worthy as David. Iannuci even has the audacity to make him vaguely unsympathetic and even dislikeable at times. Was he like this in the book, I kept asking myself. Then there's the best supporting cast you are likely to see this year; Peter Capaldi and Derry's own Bronagh Gallagher as the wonderful Micawbers, Tilda Swinton as the most lovable Betsey Trotwood imaginable with Hugh Laurie, the wisest of all Mr Dick's, Rosalind Eleazar as a gorgeous Agnes and best of all, Ben Wishaw as the most unctuous of Uriah Heep's. Just give them all one big Oscar and be done with it. Of course, purists will hate it; a few people actually walked out of the screening I was at. As for me, it's probably not the best Dickens' adaptation I've ever seen but I'm sure it's the most enjoyable.
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