BEFORE: We're counting down the last two weeks of 2021 now (just two movies to go before I put the blog on pause for the holidays) and it looks like I'm going to end this year the way I began it, which is mostly sheltered in place. Yeah, I've got two jobs but they're both shutting down after next week, and my sister cancelled her family's Christmas trip to visit my parents, and I'm one step away from doing the same. The new variant is spreading way too fast, we've got long lines at testing centers in NYC once again - and long lines at vaccination centers, too, I hope - so the end result is that even though I got my booster shot AND a flu shot, I'm just not sure it's safe out there. There are breakthrough cases, admittedly they're not severe or life-threatening, but I also DON'T want to be a transmitter, because if Omicron can break through my vaccination, can't it also break through to my vaccinated parents?
I just got a text from the staff at the theater, it seems like somebody who attended Thursday night's screening just tested positive, and saw fit to call the theater to let everybody know. Today I've got a runny nose but no fever, so what does that mean? Was I exposed on Thursday night, or is this just a reaction to the flu shot I got a week ago? There's no way to know - I mean, yeah, I can go get tested but I'd rather not, I haven't had a swab shoved up my nose yet, and I was hoping to make it through this thing without that taking place. Better to just shelter in place today, and see how I feel tomorrow - I'm scheduled to work a screening, but I'm thinking it may get cancelled now, or if I'm too sick to come in they'll probably encourage me to stay home. We'll see how I feel tomorrow morning.
A side benefit to cancelling everything again this Christmas is the fact that I haven't done much (any) Christmas shopping, and this maybe buys me another week, or even two. I'd already told my sister we should just exchange gifts in January, we'd go visit my parents in January instead of December (thus we avoid all the holiday traffic, maybe) so after I work a couple more days, I may be looking at two weeks at home, I'm not sure. But what's two more weeks after I spent like eleventy months at home during 2020 and 2021? Maybe this is a fitting end for the year, and I can return to a more normalish-routine after the winter surge - who can say?
Ben Whishaw carries over from "A Hologram for the King".
THE PLOT: A modern take on Charles Dickens' classic tale of a young orphan who is able to triumph over many obstacles.
AFTER: I've never read "David Copperfield" before, not even in high school, I've managed to avoid it all this time. So I'm going in cold, this is really my first exposure to this storyline, believe it or not. I know just enough about it to answer trivia questions about it - Uriah Heep, Mister Micawber and all that. But what's it really ABOUT? Sure, I've read "A Tale of Two Cities", "Great Expectations" and of course "A Christmas Carol", but once you go any further than that into the Dickens canon, I'm a little lost. OK, sure, "Oliver Twist", but I think I only saw two movie adaptations, and never read the book. Maybe I read "Hard Times", but I don't remember much about it. That leaves a LOT unread, like "Nicholas Nickleby", "Little Dorrit", "Barnaby Rudge", "Edwin Drood", "Martin Chuzzlewit", and probably a dozen other books with characters with funny-sounding names. "The Pickwick Papers", "The Old Curiosity Shop", "Dombey and Son", and Jesus, who the hell did Dickens think he was, the Stephen King of the 1800's?
All right, calm down, let's focus on just getting through "David Copperfield", and then I'll worry about the rest later, maybe. This has NOTHING to do with magic or magicians, that guy who pretended to make the Statue of Liberty disappear (what a bogus trick, when you learn how he "did" this, you're sure to be disappointed) was born David Seth Kotkin and just stole the name from Dickens. This David Copperfield is a character from Victorian England, who eventually becomes a famous, wealthy novelist - and right away, that's got me thinking that D.C. is a stand-in for C.D., Dickens himself, he just switched up the initials to disguise this little fact, but maybe also drop a little hint.
I'm reading up on Dicken's early life right now, and yep, there are similarities. While he wasn't an orphan, Dickens' father was sent to debtors' prison when Charles was 12, and he was sent to live with a family friend (who inspired a character in "Dombey and Son") in Camden Town. Then he lived in a back-attic of an agent for the Insolvent Court, who later inspired characters in "The Old Curiosity Shop". Charles worked long days in a factory, under harsh working conditions, and so did David Copperfield, whose job was to put corks in bottles, at the rate of 5 per minute! Then his mother died (as Copperfield's did), and she left him some money, which allowed him to go to school for a while (as Copperfield did). Dickens worked as a junior clerk in a law office (Copperfield became a proctor, very similar?) and was known for doing impressions of the lawyers and clients (Copperfield shows the same skills in this film).
Yep, I'm spot on here, Wiki calls "David Copperfield" the most autobiographical work that Dickens ever wrote, so he's clearly the Dickens stand-in. Dickens fell in love with a woman named Maria Beadnell, who was the inspiration for the Dora character here. The filmmakers chose to have the same actress who played Copperfield's mother also portray Dora (just with different hair) so I guess that says something very Oedipal about the first girl you might fall for, you're looking for somebody who reminds you of your mother? This is sort of a gender-flipped "Peter Pan" thing, where early stage productions usually cast the same actor as Wendy's father and Captain Hook. By extension, they're suggesting that a father can tend to be over-protective of his eldest daughter, trying to keep her away from irresponsible young men and might essentially keep her prisoner as part of all that. (However, it's also possible that the stage productions just couldn't afford another actor, so just used the same one twice.)
All right, enough about Dickens, we'll pick up the author's story tomorrow (hint hint) and let's just focus on Copperfield, whose father is already deceased when we meet him. His mother sends him away to visit the family of his nanny, Peggotty, who live in an overturned boat on the beach in Yarmouth. When he returns, he learns his mother has married the cruel Mr. Murdstone, who beats him when he doesn't study hard enough. Young David is sent to work in Murdstone's factory in London, putting those corks in the bottles, and he lives with Mr. Micawber, who's always on the run from his creditors. Fast forward a few years, and the Micawbers lose their house, and are sent to debtors' prison, meanwhile David is told that his mother is very ill - so ill, in fact, that she's dead. AND the funeral was last week, sorry you couldn't be there - so life pretty much sucks for young master Copperfield, but he's determined that he's going to make something of himself and turn this all around.
He tracks down his only living relative, Betsey Trotwood, and goes to live with her and her lodger (and lover?) Mr. Dick, who's so insane he thinks that thoughts from the decapitated King Charles I have somehow entered his own, but David shows him how to build a kite, write those thoughts down on the kite, and send them up into the air, thus clearing out his brain. (WTF was Dickens smoking when he wrote this? Does this even make sense?). Betsey's accountant is Mr. Wickfield, who has a daughter named Agnes and a clerk named Uriah Heep (this will all be important later, just wait.). Meanwhile, teen David Copperfield goes to a school for boys, where he meets James Steerforth and once again encounters Mr. Micawber, who's briefly one of his teachers before he's exposed as a former prison inmate and bad credit risk.
David has tea with Uriah Heep and his mother, and finds out that Uriah is trying to court Agnes, the daughter of his boss, Mr. Wickfield. David also meets Dora Spenlow, the daughter of HIS boss at his new proctor position, and he falls for her, because she reminds him so much of his mother, presumably. (remember, same actress...). Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick then show up in London, claiming to be in dire financial straits, she's lost all her investments with Mr. Wickfield. David arranges for them to be put up in a small London apartment, then he goes back to Yarmouth (Peggotty's family) with James Steerforth (friend from school). This turns out to be a terrible idea, because Peggotty's adopted daughter, Emily, runs off from her fiancé (and adopted brother?) Ham with Mr. Steerforth, and nobody can find them.
Back in London, David encounters Mr. Micawber again, he's living on the streets with his wife and whole family, so David moves them into that tiny apartment with Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick. (They steal back Micawber's concertina from a pawn shop, so there's that.). And with that, all the pieces are sort of in place for all these threads to start resolving themselves in a big domino-like chain of events.
Agnes figures out that Uriah Heep has been embezzling funds from Mr. Wickfield, and that's what happened to Betsey Trotwoods fortune. They all storm the office of Mr. Wickfield and prove their case, so Uriah Heep gets fired and discredited and Betsey gets her money back (I think?). Dora breaks up with David, clearing the way for him to start a new romance with another character who doesn't look like his mother. And they track down Emily, who's been hiding out in London ever since Steerforth left her in France, saying she was better off without him. He's right, of course, but it's just so rare when a man admits that.
In the midst of all that, David Copperfield somehow becomes an author - they somehow found a little room for him in that tiny London apartment with 50 people living in it, for him to gather together all the little slips of paper that he wrote down quotes on, and he could kind of assemble all of them into a book, presumably that's the same writing technique that Dickens himself used. And just as we saw in "Little Women", that book becomes a hit in the fictional world, and also in the real world, and the author of the book within the book represents the author of the book in real life. (It's not as confusing as I make it out to be, I just like to do things the hard way.)
David Copperfield (the character) becomes rich and famous, much as Charles Dickens did. Dickens enjoyed celebrity status within his own lifetime, which seems appropriate for the guy who invented serialization, cliffhangers, book tours and merchandising. Would we even have daily soap operas or monthly comic books without him? We generally use "Dickensian" to describe stories about financial woes or poor working conditions, but I suspect that many more stories should be called "Dickensian" in the long run.
There's that big elephant in the room, though, which I haven't even brought up, because I don't want to sound racist, but I just don't approve of this new-fangled multi-cultural approach to storytelling, where they cast a bunch of non-white actors to play what are traditionally all-white roles. ("Non-traditional casting") To some degree I support it, however I also find it very distracting, because it's just NOT a reflection of the way things were in the 1700's or 1800's. I call this the "Hamilton" conundrum, because color-blind casting isn't as color-blind as it claims to be. What it really IS seems to be, "Hey, let's cast a bunch of African-American, Asian-American and Latinos in white roles, because that will shake up the status quo and make a point about racial discrimination!" OK, fine, you've made your point, but you had to essentially tell an inaccurate story to do it. And now you're purposefully casting a Latin actor as Alexander Hamilton or an Indian actor as David Copperfield, so that isn't really color-blind, is it? You're just doing with minority actors what casting directors did for so many years with Caucasian actors, I'm not saying it's reverse discrimination but I can see how some might perceive it as such. Truly color-blind casting would create a cast that's made up of a number of random races, and then I might believe that every actor was cast according to their talent, and not their ethnicity, but honestly, I don't think I've seen that just yet, I've only seen the films that are trying to be disruptive in their casting, in order to make the point.
I just don't understand who benefits from anyone pretending in a movie that society in the 1800's was more racially diverse and minority tolerant than it really was. Is that wrong of me?
Also starring Dev Patel (last seen in "The Man Who Knew Infinity"), Aneurin Barnard (last seen in "The Goldfinch"), Peter Capaldi (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Morfydd Clark (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Daisy May Cooper, Rosalind Eleazar, Hugh Laurie (last seen in "The Borrowers" (1997)), Tilda Swinton (last seen in "The Limits of Control"), Paul Whitehouse (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Benedict Wong (last seen in "Gemini Man"), Nikki Amuka-Bird (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Darren Boyd (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Gwendoline Christie (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Matthew Cottle (last seen in "The Dresser" (2015)), Bronagh Gallagher (last seen in "Albert Nobbs"), Anthony Welsh (last seen in "Red Tails"), Aimée Kelly, Anna Maxwell Martin (last seen in "Becoming Jane"), Victor McGuire (last seen in "The Woman in Black"), Peter Singh (last seen in "Hampstead"), Ruby Bentail (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Divian Ladwa (last seen in "Ant-Man and the Wasp"), Rosaleen Linehan, Sophie McShera (last seen in "Cinderella" (2015)), Lynn Hunter, Jairaj Varsani, Fisayo Akinade, Faisal Dacosta, Freddie Meredith
RATING: 5 out of 10 broken bottles
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