Review: "The Personal History of David Copperfield"

I admit I haven't read a lot of Dickens; like a lot of people I associate him with long, dreary tales of woe. "It is a far, far better thing" and all that. He sort of gets stuck in that continuum of “stuff you were made to read in school.”

Yet here is an adaptation of perhaps his most famous work that is full of light and color and joy. "The Personal History of David Copperfield" does some modernized tweaking of the story, but really it's the perspective that has shifted.

There are still untimely deaths, and pitiful poverty, and hissable evildoers, and unhappy marriages, and all the other attributes of Charles Dickens' semi-autobiographical tale. And yet director Armando Iannucci, who co-wrote the script with Simon Blackwell, manages to mold all that into a vibrant, upbeat story about perseverance and hope.

Jairaj Varsani plays Copperfield, a scrappy young boy raised in a home where he was showered with attention and love, including his widowed mother and beloved maid, Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper). Then he is mistreated by his new stepfather, Murdstone (Darren Boyd) and his sister (Gwendoline Christie), and eventually sent away to work in a wine bottling factor as a child laborer.

At this point Dev Patel takes over the role, as his fate and the name he is called continually change. For awhile he is a proper gentleman, supported by his wealthy aunt (Tilda Swinton), who insists upon calling him Trotwood, her married name. He goes to school with upper crust boys, fearful of his sordid past being found out by the likes of Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard), a snobby but charming sort who calls him "Daisy."

Later he becomes an apprentice proctor, which is a sort of lawyer (though Dickens, who himself was one, admits he never did figure out exactly what sort of law they practice). He becomes entranced by his boss' daughter, the daft but harmless Dora (Morfydd Clark). But then things come crashing down when his aunt loses all her money and Davis is faced with returning to the squalid ways he thought he'd left behind.

Let's stop a moment and talk about the mixed races of the cast. Dickens was, of course, a Brit and the characters in his books were overwhelmingly in the pale spectrum -- as was England in the 19th century. So what's going on with an Indian in the main role? And folks of African, Asian, Latin, and seemingly every other ethnic heritage bobbing all about as if this was any kind of accurate representation of the place and time?

I'm sure it will bother some people, but it doesn't me. The film aims to be a celebratory, colorful version of Dicken's novel, and that is deliberately extended to the hues of the people as well.

There purposefully isn't any rhyme or reason to it, so for instance all of David's relations are white even though he's a lovely deep brown. And Mr. Wickfield, the humorously drunken lawyer who is a friend to his aunt, is played by Chinese actor Benedict Wong while his daughter, David's best friend Agnes, is portrayed by a black Brit, Rosalind Eleazar.

Strangely we have reached a point in our societal (d)evolution where people from the extreme wings of both ends of the spectrum would object to this casting, one calling it racism and the other calling it cultural appropriation, though they both end up meaning pretty much the same thing.

They can all sod off.

Back to the movie. There are some really terrific supporting performances, starting with Tilton, whose Mrs. Trotwood is somehow both extremely rigid, furiously chasing donkeys off her property, while also being persuaded to listen to her inner heart. Her companion, Mr. Dick, is played by Hugh Laurie as an addled, nervous wreck who can be a genius when he settles down long enough for his mind to calm. He is convinced that the thoughts of King Charles I invaded his own after his execution, never mind that it happened two centuries earlier.

I also quite enjoyed Peter Capaldi as Mr. Micawber, an itinerant huckster who was David's landlord when he was a boy in London. Micawber owes money all around town, and most of his time is spent dodging collectors using trickery and disguises. He turns up again in David's life in college and thereafter, still grifting but somehow eternally occupying a warm place in his heart.

(Not surprising, considering Micawber is supposedly based on Dickens' own dad.)

Ben Whishaw makes an impression as the irrepressible Uriah Heep, a servant at David's school who is famous for his cloying, obsequious manner. Like Macawber he turns up again later in the story, though to no credit of his own.

The story moves along at a pretty good truck, and rather than risk getting sunk into the many subplots and characters of the book, the filmmakers choose to dance upon the lily pads above them. Don't feel bad if you can't keep track of everyone's names -- I had to look them all up in writing this review, with the exceptions of Copperfield and Heep.

This version of "David Copperfield" is so enjoyable, in fact, that I'm tempted to take another crack at the book.

Review: "Radioactive"

There’s little crackle of original energy in “Radioactive.” This by-the-numbers biopic of scientist Marie Curie holds few surprises and insights, and feels like it’s just checking off boxes on somebody’s clipboard.

Rosamund Pike plays Curie, the famed French – actually, born in Poland as Maria Sklodowska – scientist who along with her husband Pierre Curie (Sam Riley) pioneered the research of radioactivity, i.e. the process by which unstable matter decays and gives off energy.

Directed by Marjane Satrapi (“Persepolis”) from a screenplay by Jack Thorne (based on a book by Lauren Redniss), “Radioactive” plays out as a standard “great man/woman” film. We are astounded at the massive accomplishments of one person while learning about the personal challenges that nearly kept them from historic achievement.

Certainly, Curie’s bona fides for notoriety are indisputable: first woman to win the Nobel Prize, shared with her husband and fellow physicist, she matched that a few years later by becoming the first person to win a second Nobel in a different field, chemistry. She was the first female professor at the University of Paris, discovered two new elements for the Periodic Table and pioneered the use of X-ray machines on the battlefield of World War I, saving countless lives and limbs.

Curie is, quite literally, in the Panthéon of greatness.

The story starts with Curie’s death – likely due to radiation poisoning, as thousands of chucklers have loved to joke. Both Curies unwittingly received massive doses of harmful energy during their years of experimentation. Only later did they learn about people who had partaken of the benefits of their research who were developing tumors or anemia.

This is the sort of movie where the star is wheeled into the hospital in copious stippling makeup to make her look older, and the head physician loudly exclaims: “But this is Madame Curie!!” Everything in the story feels twice underlined as if we were missing how this is all Much Importance.

The portrait that emerges is of a headstrong woman who put her science first, but nevertheless found true love with Pierre. Early on she loses her place in the university laboratory due to sexist pig-headedness, and he offers Marie a spot in his. Despite their promise not to share experiments or beds, they soon do.

Pierre died in 1906 in a street accident, and for a time Curie found herself buffeted by oppressive forces from French society – especially when she took up with her younger, married colleague, Paul Langevin (Aneurin Barnard). She was even accused of being a foreign collaborator and a Jew to boot.

The film loses juice in the second half after being sustained by Curie’s relationship with Pierre. It is interesting to see a portrait of historical marriage in which the woman is clearly the dominant force. At one point she even coldly informs him, “My mind is finer.”

Once that cycle of magnetic attraction and repulsion is over, though, the story seems to bleed energy with an astonishingly short half-life. Anya Taylor-Joy briefly shows up too late as Curie’s now-adult daughter, Irene. (Who would later go on to win her own Nobel in conjunction with her husband/collaborator.)

There are a few dream-like sequences set in the future where we see the consequences of Curie’s discoveries, such as a crippled boy receiving radiation treatment or an atomic bomb test in 1960s America. The movie tries too hard to convince us of the monumental consequence of this life, as if Marie Curie were a name wholly unknown.

Pity that “Radioactive” didn’t better take to heart the lessons of its subject, and shown a little more enthusiasm for experimentation.

Video review: "Dunkirk"

A very atypical war movie, “Dunkirk” shows us the plight of the Allies during the lowest point of World War II, when hundreds of thousands of British troops were trapped on the shores of France with no way to get home. It’s a story of heroism, rather than individual heroes.

There are characters – the cast includes Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Jack Lowden, Fionn Whitehead, Barry Keoghan, Cillian Murphy, Harry Styles and Mark Rylance – but they exist more as archetypes than specific people. Most of them are not even named, and their dialogue is restricted to the mission at hand.

There are no wistful remembrances of girls back home, or what job you had before the war, such as in “Saving Private Ryan.” Director/writer Christopher Nolan keeps his camera’s eye focused on the immediate peril, the mad dash to survive, and the nobility that ensued.

You might be surprised to find how little fighting there is in the film. Aside from an aerial dogfight and a few volleys of gunfire here and there, the movie’s intensity comes from the fear of death more than the actual depiction of it. Hans Zimmer’s musical score gives us beats and notes without much clear semblance of a melody.

If it sounds like I’m criticizing the film, I’m not. I appreciated how “Dunkirk” took a very different approach to depicting war, focusing more on the you-are-there experience of it rather than the geopolitical forces or personalities.

The film’s true triumph comes in showing us that, nearly 80 years on, there are still new stories to tell about that terrible conflict, and new ways of telling them.

Bonus features are quite extensive, and are the same for the DVD or Blu-ray editions. They consist of 16 making-of featurettes, each focused on a specific part of production. Like the film itself, they are divided into sections of Land, Air and Sea, along with another section dubbed “Creation.”

Collectively they essentially form a feature-length documentary about the making of “Dunkirk,” covering everything from camera work to the air battles and conjuring a flotilla of small private boats.

Film:



Extras: 

Review: "Dunkirk"

There aren’t any characters in Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk,” at least not really. It’s not a story of individual men so much as a tale of mankind -- his possibilities for mayhem and potential for nobility. This is a war film with very little fighting, an ode to humanity in which no one man stands too far above the rest.

Nolan recreates the mass evacuation of Allied forces at Dunkirk in 1940, the lowest point of World War II when it seemed that the Reich truly was on the verge of toppling the entire world. Hundreds of thousands of troops were trapped on the French coastline, surrounded by Germans, desperately trying to make their way across the Chanel despite too few ships to transport them and not enough planes to protect the ones that did manage to disembark.

The individual story threads are fiction, but together they weave themselves into a thundering representation of the heroism, cowardice and sheer terror of those few days. I have no doubt this film will receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, and many others.

I was surprised when I learned this movie was one hour and 46 minutes long; I thought for certain I had misread it instead of two hours, 46 minutes. But no, “Dunkirk” is the rare war epic that sprawls in scope but not length. There’s an economy to Nolan’s filmmaking here, harkening back to his breakout with “Memento,” like a middleweight fighter who’s all sinew, packing a powerful punch from a modest frame carrying no fat.

The narrative consists of a handful of storylines that intersect when we least expect it, intercutting between them in an order that is not necessarily chronological. At one point we encounter a man, beaten and hollow-eyed, and are surprised to later see him calm and in command. We can guess what happened to him in between, but we don’t know.

This is a true ensemble acting effort, with no lead performers. Fionn Whitehead comes closest to that designation, playing a private who ends up encountering nearly all the other characters in one way or another. He’s a young private who tries to sneak his way to the head of the evacuation line, and keeps finding himself pushed by circumstance further away from salvation. Like many other characters, we never even hear his name.

Kenneth Branagh is the naval officer in charge of the evacuation, standing like a sentinel against the coming apocalypse. Mark Rylance plays Dawson, a Brit civilian who launches his tiny boat, Moonstone, in a seemingly vain effort to help out, his teenage son (Tom Glynn-Carney) and friend (Barry Keoghan) tagging along.

Up in the skies, Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden portray RAF fighter pilots chasing the German planes who are hunting those soldiers who have managed to get off the shore in boats. Their fuel is running lower and lower, but they know that every enemy shot down could mean hundreds of lives saved. So they watch their gauge needles, and stay a little longer.

(Though he’s not credited, I’m fairly certain it’s Michael Caine as the voice of their commander over the radio.)

There are no genuine battles in “Dunkirk,” other than some aerial dogfighting. The Allied soldiers hunker on the beach, hoping for a ship, or if they made it onto one, pray they’re not spotted by German planes or U-boats. There is no illusion of winning here, merely a frantic struggle to survive.

The film is a technical marvel, a seamless combination of live action and CGI effects that convince us we’re right in the thick of it. The metal hulls of the Spitfires pop with the stress of sharp banking; the seas go nearly black with oil spilled from ships stoven in by bombs like playthings.

Hans Zimmer’s musical score is a masterpiece of mood without melody. Reminiscent of the old Vangelis scores from the 1980s, the eclectic combination of tones and rhythm soars or sinks as the prospects for survival wane and wax.

In the middle of a summer of popcorn movies and dimwit comedies, “Dunkirk” rises, grim-faced and commanding, to grab our attention.