Armando Ianucci

THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD: Dickins alive at last

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Dev Patel in THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD

Here’s an unexpected treat: Amando Ianucci’s vivid and brilliantly constructed The Personal History of David Copperfield. Unexpected because I’ve never warmed to the work of Charles Dickins or to any Dickins movies (except for the 1951 A Christmas Carol with Alistair Sim).

Of course David Copperfield IS a storyteller and Ianucci uses the device of David’s storytelling to frame the tale as David remembers it and as his readers and listeners imagine it in their own minds. Ianucci makes the highs in David’s life so vibrant and the lows so piercing, that the total package is a dazzling delight.

Dev Patel, he of the instantaneous appeal and the gleaming smile, is perfect as the quick-witted and charming David Copperfield. Patel’s David suffers grievance after grievance, just waiting for a moment of good luck when he can control his destiny.

That the talented David Copperfield, because of his station, cannot control his destiny in the class-constricted Victorian society is the whole point of David Copperfield, social criticism which Dickins keeps from stridency with his humor.

That’s prime territory for Armando Ianucci. Ianucci is a master of wickedly funny political satire, having directed In The Loop and Death of Stalin and created the television series Veep. (In case you want to know what I do on my day job, I am basically Malcom Tucker in In the Loop, whom you can find on YouTube.) Ianucci’s production designer, Cristina Casali, deserves a shout-out, too.

Peter Capaldi in THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD

It’s a wonderful cast, including Tilda Swinton and Hugh Laurie. The standouts are:

  • Laurie as the addled, but dignified, Mr. Dick.
  • Ben Whishaw as one of literature’s most distinctive villains, Uriah Heep.
  • Peter Capaldi (who played the aforementioned Malcom Tucker) as Mr. Micawber, a character modeled after Dickins’ own father.
  • Rosalind Eleazer as the even-smarrter-than-David Agnes.
  • Morfydd Clark as the sweetly vacant Dora Seamans.
  • Bronagh Gallagher (who played one of the backup singers in The Commitments) as the remarkably glass-half-full Mrs. Micawber.

Dickins wrote this story about white people in Victorian England. As is obvious with the casting of Patel as David, The Personal History of David Copperfield has an interracial cast, based on a premise that any actor can play any role. I’m okay with that, and I think as more directors cast their movies this way, the distracting aspects will evaporate for most viewers.

The Personal History of David Copperfield is streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

THE DEATH OF STALIN: gallows humor from the highest of scaffolds

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Jason Isaacs and Steve Buscemi in THE DEATH OF STALIN

One might not expect the death of Josef Stalin and the subsequent maneuvering of his cronies to make for a savagely funny movie, but that is exactly what writer-director Armando Ianucci has accomplished in in The Death of Stalin.  In his Veep and In the Loop, Ianucci has proved himself an expert in mocking the ambition, venality and flattery of those reaching for power.  In The Death of Stalin, he adds terror to his quiver of motivations, and the result is darkly hilarious.

Serving Stalin was a high-wire act.  By the end of Stalin’s Great Terror, everyone still standing in the Soviet leadership had survived by flattering Stalin and by loyally carrying out every Stalin command, no matter how misguided and/or murderous.  Given that the slightest misstep – or even a wholly imagined fragment of Stalin’s paranoia – could lead to a summary bullet-in-the-head, this was no small achievement.  These may have been the most powerful men at the very top of a superpower, but they have all been traumatized into extreme caution by years of fear.

For example, when Stalin suffers a cerebral hemorrhage and falls to the floor, his guards are afraid to burst into his room.  When Stalin is discovered on the floor by his housekeeper, the regime’s top leaders gather around him and decide on next steps.  The first question is whether to call a doctor, because they fear that if Stalin wakes up and finds that someone else has made a decision, he will have them executed.  (Once they get past that, they must work around the fact that Stalin has already killed or exiled all the competent doctors in Moscow.)

Of course, it would be absurd for Stalin’s inner circle to refrain from calling a doctor for hours and hours.  But it really happened.  So did all of the other key occurrences in the movie, although the events were compressed from the real six months into a three-day movie plot.

This cast is brilliant.  Steve Buscemi is cast as Nikita Kruschev and proves to be an inspired choice.  Jason Isaacs, with a ridiculously broad (but historically accurate) chest full of medals, is especially delightful as Field Marshal Zhukov.   Michael Palin, as Molotov, has one of the best bits as he deadpans political correctness while figuring out whether he can admit that the sudden release of his imprisoned wife is really good news.  Each one of the actors – Simon Russell Beale, Olga Kuryenko, Paddy Considine, Jeffrey Tambor, Andrea Riseborough – gets to shine with Ianucci’s dialogue.

This is gallows humor from the highest of scaffolds.  The Death of Stalin is an insightful exploration of terror – and hilarious, too.