Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

NEW BOTTLES FOR OLD WINE 

I recently saw Amando Iannucci’s film The Personal History of David Copperfield, very loosely based on Dickens’ novel. The film has received much praise and ecstatic reviews. It has won some awards. Alas, I give you a minority report – always the best sort of report because it shows an independent mind.

I thought as a film The Personal History of David Copperfield was rubbish.

To forestall your pre-conceptions, I am not bringing in this verdict because the film omitted many characters and events from the novel. I understand all lengthy novels have to be abridged and compressed when they are turned into screenplays for the cinema. It does not faze me in the least that there was no Barkis (as in “Barkis is willing”) and no Rosa Dartle, the girl with the scarred lip. In this version, the scarred lip is given to the villainous Steerforth’s mother. Fair enough. Compressions do have to be made, although over the years I have come to believe that capacious nineteenth-century novels are better adapted as television serials than as single movies, because television serialisations can better convey a novel’s leisurely pace and (in the case of Dickens) repeated comic effects..

To forestall another pre-conception you may have, I am not too worried that Dev Patel, of Indian parentage, was cast in title role. He is an agile and charming comic actor. I must admit, though, that elements of the determinedly multi-racial cast did perturb me. Surely I was not the only member of the viewing public to have my disbelief totally un-suspended when the very English actor playing Steerforth is given an African mother; or when the Asian Mr Wickfield apparently has an African daughter.

What most alienated me were the many foolish decisions the screenwriter had made. All pathos and warmth were drained out of episodes where David Copperfield runs away from London and walks all the way to Dover to find refuge with his eccentric aunt Betsey Trotwood. David is still a little waif boy in the novel when he performs this feat. In the film, he is a fully grown man, which inadvertently gives the impression that he is somehow mentally impaired. Why was this change made? I suspect because the screenwriter wanted to dash on to later episodes. On top of this, there was much excruciatingly bad casting, even ignoring the multi-racial aspect. Peter Capaldi is simply wrong as Wilkins Micawber, having none of that character’s oratorical fruitiness; Tilda Swinton is simply wrong as Betsey Trotwood, prim and domineering but cold and not reflecting Miss Trotwood’s generous eccentricity. The only actor who really comes out of it with credit is Hugh Laurie as Mr Dick, appropriately dotty. I won’t go into the fussy (and confusing) way this film harps on the story as pure fiction (laboured sequences of David writing his own story; characters directly conversing with the author about their roles etc.). I have given you enough of what I think of it.

I conclude that much of the praise the film has received is like the forced laughter you sometimes hear when people think they have to appreciate a joke they do not really like. There is a multi-racial cast, the director and casting people are recognising the multi-ethnic reality that is England now, therefore we must applaud or we will be regarded as reactionary.

So much for the film.

Now for related reflections.

Recently, and particularly in America, Black, Hispanic and Asian groups have protested at what they call the “whitewashing” of characters in mainstream Hollywood films. This refers to the frequent habit of casting white actors in roles that  were often (in the source material from which the films are adapted) intended to be Black, Hispanic or Asian characters. How dare Johnny Depp play Amerindian Tonto in a remake of The Lone Ranger! How dare Ben Affleck play a Latino character in Argo!!   This, so protesters say, is as demeaning as the blackface performances that were standard practice in the Hollywood of long ago. Often (but not always) I think this is a fair and reasonable ground for protest.

But what of the parallel distortion we are now getting in what might be called “blackwashing” or “brownwashing”? African or Asian actors are now cast in what are clearly European roles. I can understand this phenomenon when we are dealing with theatrical companies. Quite rightly, most will now have a multi-ethnic crew of actors, and non-European actors can’t very well be left out of productions which are so often European classics or revivals of popular West End or Broadway plays from some years back. Recently – during the lock-down – I watched transcriptions of productions put on by Britain’s National Theatre, and saw some black actors in plays like The Duchess of Malfi and Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea. Not too convincing in either case, but understandable where the employment of actors is concerned.

In contrast, the production company of a film like The Personal History of David Copperfield could draw together any cast it could afford. Clearly, assembling a multi-racial cast was a deliberate artistic decision and an attempt to make a statement of some sort.  But here’s the big problem. In 19^th century Britain, among middle-class society, the sight of African, Indian or Asian people would probably make them objects of wonder or curiosity or ridicule or mean contempt. I’m aware that nearly all fictionalised films set in past ages create a false impression of what history was. But in The Personal History of David Copperfield there is a particular form of falsification.  As if Dickens wasn’t fantastical enough, we are presented with the illusion that all was racial harmony and racial integration in Victorian England. Nobody raises an eyebrow at an Indian David Copperfield wooing a very English Dora Spenlow etc. etc. The effect, intentionally or not, is very like those old Hollywood films that told us all was well in the old Deep South, there was no tension and disharmony between races, and those were the good old days.

Whatever its good intentions may have been, The Personal History of David Copperfield is peddling the same lie. It’s a new bottle for old wine.

Footnotes: Check out on this blog my review of Oliver Schreiner’s dated and bombastic novel TheStory of an African Farm and you will find in its footnote a brief account of another film which places an African in a role that helps to falsify the past.

Also, as proof that The Personal History of David Copperfield does not necessarily make me pine for earlier film versions of Dickens’ novel, see my less-than-enthusiastic comments on Hollywood’s 1930s adaptation of David Copperfield under the heading WaxworksShows in Motion.