Writing your own history: The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020)

Spring has truly sprung in Armando Iannuci's re- imagination of the Charles Dickens classic David Copperfield. Staring Dev Patel and a who's who of British stars, The Personal History of David Copperfield is a time-bending, fourth wall breaking, imaginative and creative journey through poverty and wealth, boy to man. Where Iannuci fans may be used to his caustic, absurdist comedy like The Death of Stalin (2017) this film manages to blend comedic relief with trademark Dickensian bleakness. The result is an incredibly likeable adaptation that can teach us all a powerful lesson in the importance of owning your narrative.

The film opens with David Copperfield presenting to us the cinema audience his life story (see above image.) What marks this telling as a performance is an audience of his peers that observes and interacts with the tumultuous narrative presented before them. He walks from the stage, right into the scene of his own birth, and thus the story is begun. It continues in this way as a multilayered performance — in one instance Iannuci projects a flashback of young Copperfield onto the fabric hanging in his small Victorian flat.

The Personal History of David Copperfield is a journey of self-discovery that makes the most of utilising the arts of writing, drawing, and music in its performance. Art and performance routinely acts as an escape for Coppefield, he draws imaginatively under the tyranic rule of Mr Murdstone, his stepfather. The figure of Murdstone is the enemy of imagination, ridiculing Copperfield's inventing drawing of a boathouse. Seething with anger - "It can either be a boat or a house!" - he attempts to implore sense and reason into the imaginative child. However if Mr Murdstone is the enemy of art, then Peter Capaldi's Mr. Micawber and Hugh Laurie's Mr. Dick are the antidotal creative relief. In helping Mr. Dick soothe and channel the obtrusive thoughts of his mind, Copperfield finds a use and application of his empathy and quick-wit that was shunned by Murdstone. His idea to fly the hundreds of parchment scraps, filled with Mr Dick's obtrusive thoughts, on a kite gives us a powerful visual image.

A smiling Hugh Laurie, laughing at the trail of drawings and words through the blue skies, flies the cause of his muddled brain far above him. The tail of the kite, dip and soar through the spring sky, trailing parchment scraps and drawings behind it. This visual is an emphatic reminder that imagination and art have the power to draw you out of strife.

Imagination and the power of writing is inevitably Copperfield's salvation. Downtrodden and living in poverty - following the collapse of a legal career - he writes himself into better circumstances. He imagines and constructs his tumultous life into a coherant and entertaining narrative. The strife of his childhood and financial downfalls become a way out of his struggle, rewarding him with financial success. The Personal History of David Coppefield, is not the same as Dickens' novel. Where Dora Spenlow, dies of a miscarridge, Iannuci's adapation merely writes her out of Coppefield's life. Dora appears to David, and asks him to do so - writing her out of his manuscript as she simply does not "fit."

Throughout the course of the film, Copperfield is addressed as anything rather than his given name. Becoming David Murdstone, Trotwood Copperfield, and even Daisy, acts as a method of survival for Copperfield. When he finally asserts himself with his true name it is a moment of homecoming for the film. And so the film's ending image, an adult David speaking and assuring his younger self, is the narrative coming full circle. The film is book- ended by interactions between young/adult David - reiterating that this is the very personal history of David Copperfield.