WORLD TOUR Day 31 - London, England
BEFORE: This is a Dickens story I'm unfamiliar with, so at least the plot could surprise me tonight. But I'm guessing I know some of the elements, like a poor English boy coming of age - aren't all Dickens stories about that sort of thing? Linking from "Oliver Twist", Jamie Foreman was also in the film "Inkheart" with Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Superman IV: The Quest for Peace")
THE PLOT: A young compassionate man struggles to save his family and friends from the abusive exploitation of his coldheartedly grasping uncle.
AFTER: This Dickens adaptation was made in 2002, but it couldn't be more timely considering the recession we've been living through these last three years. Remember when we learned that the whole U.S. economy collapsed because some bank lumped a bunch of shaky mortgages together, and then got other banks to invest in them? Well, it was something like that, I'm not an economist. I think someone maybe just put a decimal point in the wrong place, and it was just some horrible misunderstanding that screwed up...well, everyone. The point is, it made people feel like they weren't in control of their own finances, and that the deck was being stacked against us by bankers, of all people.
Turns out this sort of thing has been going on for a long time - market speculation of some unnamed sort causes the ruin of Nicholas Nickleby's father, and that's the start of a long, hard economic road for his family. They pack up and head to London to seek help from his uncle Ralph, who's only interested in helping Nicholas find work if there's something in it for him. He also doesn't mind hooking up his niece with his investors with grabby hands, if that's also profitable.
In a lot of these Dickens stories, like "Great Expectations" or "Oliver Twist", there's a mystery benefactor who offers financial help or life advice, but remains anonymous. The uncle functions here as sort of the opposite - the more he "helps" Nicholas, the deeper in debt the young man becomes. In another sense he's sort of reminiscent of Ebenezer Scrooge from "A Christmas Carol", who also placed wealth before family relationships.
Nicholas strives to be a man of honor, to do the right thing, to speak out against the abuses and ills of the world as he sees it, but unfortunately these actions are also in conflict with his financial well-being. Dickens' socio-economic tour of his world takes Nicholas to teach at a horrible boarding school for boys (reminiscent of the workhouse in "Oliver Twist"), and then to perform with a theater company before returning to London and getting a job in the world of finance.
The rest is a chess game of sorts, always trying to stay one step ahead of his uncle and the boarding school's headmaster, who have teamed up to bring Nicholas down, striking at him and his family whenever they can. Fortunately there is a benefactor as well, in the form of the uncle's clerk, who secretly relays information to Nicholas about the uncle's plans.
There are a few contrivances here, Nicholas always seems to find just the right person to help him at just the right time, and one incredible coincidence that strains credulity, but that's just how Dickens works. (I think most of Dickens' stories were published as serialized chapters, so there needed to be a lot of surprise reveals and cliffhanger moments.) The main message of the film might be "Get a job!", but the secondary message is that life is sometimes short and cruel, fortunes fail and death is inevitable, so you have to form a family and make your own happiness, whatever your economic situation may be.
Also starring Charlie Hunnam (last seen in "Children of Men"), Christopher Plummer (last seen in "Inside Daisy Clover"), Jamie Bell (last seen in "Jumper"), Anne Hathaway (last seen in "Alice in Wonderland"), Juliet Stevenson, Timothy Spall (last seen in "Death Defying Acts"), Kevin McKidd, with cameos from Nathan Lane (last heard in "The Lion King 2"), Alan Cumming (last heard in "Garfield"), and Barry "Dame Edna" Humphries (last seen in "Bedazzled").
RATING: 5 out of 10 spoonfuls of treacle
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