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Chris Louttit, Writing as if for Life: Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019), Adaptation, Volume 13, Issue 2, August 2020, Pages 274–278, https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apaa023
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Extract
In promoting The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019), Armando Iannucci repeatedly stressed the continuing relevance of Dickens’s novel. He claimed to be ‘struck by how contemporary it felt’ (qtd. in Singer), or ‘astonished by the unexpected modernity of the narrative’ (Iannucci). The idea that Dickens’s world is also our world colours Iannucci’s approach in adapting this hefty Dickensian tome; he wanted to sweep away the tired conventions of the classic novel adaptation, with the ambition of making it ‘look like costume dramas have never existed’ (qtd. in Singer). These sorts of claims have become familiar enough in the marketing of canonical literary adaptations. In the case of Iannucci’s film, however, the sales pitch is justified: this is a joyous swerve away from what we’ve come to expect from neo-Dickensian drama that also represents a new, less overtly political phase in the director’s career.
Iannucci is, of course, best known internationally for his scathing political satires on the big and small screen, from the BBC’s TheThick of It (2005–12), up to HBO’s more recent Veep (2012–19) and The Death of Stalin (2017). While sharing the historical setting yet recognizably modern tone of the latter, his David Copperfield is more personal than the writer-director’s earlier work, representing a self-confessed, partial retreat from ‘the kind of toxic discussions we’re having in politics at the moment’ (Iannucci qtd. in Singer). The Personal History of David Copperfield resists the temptation to turn Dickens into a Brexity, state-of-the-nation rant, and also sidesteps the gloom and moral murkiness of other recent BBC classic adaptations such as Mammoth Screen’s The War of the Worlds and FX’s A Christmas Carol (both 2019). Rather, as the adaptation’s director and co-writer has claimed, he ‘wanted to make something happy and positive’ (qtd. in Singer). The film is certainly that, and represents further exploration of Iannucci’s own fascination with Dickens rather than a continuation of his political comedies. Indeed, if there’s an obvious precursor in Iannucci’s career to David Copperfield, it’s not something like In the Loop (2009), but his BBC4 documentary Armando’s Tale of Charles Dickens (2012). This deeply personal, bio-critical reading of the Victorian period’s most famous author coincided with the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth. While the United Kingdom has undergone a period of significant political turmoil since 2012, Iannucci’s readings of Dickens in the documentary and in the adaptation seem remarkably stable. In Armando’s Tale of Charles Dickens, he stresses the imaginative and comic elements of the great author’s art, noting the expansiveness of Dickens that makes the universe of his fiction spill beyond the pages of just one novel. And he highlights the freshness and contemporaneity of Dickens’s fiction, avoiding the use of biographers and critics as talking heads and favouring instead fellow comedians and Dickens enthusiasts from other walks of life.
