The Personal History of David Copperfield

It feels crazy for me to say that an adaptation of David Copperfield by Armando Iannucci is one of my favorite films of the year, but I loved this movie. It's so much fun. Dev Patel is so wonderful, and his joy is infectious. This is also gorgeously styled, so that the entire thing unfolds like a storybook. Some of the transitions actually took my breath away they're so clever and beautiful. It's also very, very funny, and the adaptation is very strong, mercifully avoiding the entire marriage between David and Dora as well as reducing the role of Uriah Heep (also a mercy). 

This David Copperfield isn't perfect: Tilda Swinton is no Edna May Oliver, and at times the usual Dickensian threads come to seem outlandish, but even this is dealt with by Iannucci in a clever way. 

I am comparing this film, by the way, to George Cukor's 1935 The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, & Observation of David Copperfield the Younger, which I first watched about six months ago in anticipation of the 2020 adaptation. One intriguing point of comparison is that the star of the 1935 film is Freddie Bartholomew, who was about ten years old when the film was made, so that movie skews in a cutesy, childlike direction, and David's growth is delayed so the actor can keep playing the part. The 2020 adaptation is trying very hard to get us to Dev Patel as quickly as possible, so his time at school takes up a great deal more space. But this new film also has an excellent child actor in Ranveer Jaiswal, and Iannucci uses him beautifully, and his return at the film's end was perfect.

Either way, I had a blast watching this adaptation and really loved it.

The Death of Stalin

Armando Iannucci is a great political satirist – I loved his 2009 film In the Loop – and The Death of Stalin is occasionally very, very funny.

Jason Isaacs is great, as usual, and Andrea Riseborough (as she is in almost every movie she's in) is best in show here, and Rupert Friend is also excellent. The other players are all great - Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor, and Steve Buscemi.

Of course, because the film is describing life under totalitarianism, much of what we are watching is totally absurd (artists like Václav Havel and Sławomir Mrożek taught us this).

But Iannucci's film is uneven throughout. I found it hard to laugh at the people being senselessly assassinated by Lavrenti Beria and his men. It's designed to be funny, but it just didn't strike me as such. As I say, there was lots of funny stuff in the film, and the performances are great, but the tone seemed off to me. Totalitarianism in principle is very funny, and maybe if we were focusing only on bureaucracy I would have been able to enjoy myself more, but after all, many many people are being killed and tortured. I think it's sort of hard to oscillate between these two extremes.