“… I love being called by other names.”
Iannucci does it again. I love how showy this thing is. David starts telling his story on a stage, then adult Dev Patel gets to walk around inside his own childhood. Walls blow away in the middle of conversations. Even getting from one scene to the next is a pleasure.
Zac Nicholson used angled mirrors and actors in an adjoining room to make the people David is writing appear in front of him. It’s Pepper’s Ghost, a stage illusion used in an 1862 presentation of Dickens’s own The Haunted Man. This sort of showing off makes me very happy.
The colorblind casting is a wonder. Patel is perfect for this, so charming and so willing to be awkward that I love just watching him try to get through a conversation. Iannucci doesn’t stop to explain why he’s David, or invent a family history to justify casting him. Patel worried that the discussion of his skin color would overshadow the work. Turns out, so what? There is so much pleasure in the performance itself. He has to keep up with a cast full of people who could take over the film, and I never lose interest in him when they arrive.
I especially enjoy the Micawbers, who look like the best company in the movie while being in absolutely no position to entertain anybody. Suzie Harman and Robert Worley put them in fuchsia and emerald and clashing patterns. Even when their circumstances get worse, the costumes keep those colors. Peter Capaldi makes Micawber’s determination to keep talking through his money problems funny and increasingly painful, and absent loads and loads of profanity that admit I sort of want from every Capaldi performance now.. I want things to get easier for him. The film gives me plenty to enjoy about this family without making their poverty seem quaint.
I feel that affection in the way it treats Hugh Laurie’s Mr. Dick, too. David takes his trouble with the thoughts of Charles I seriously enough to help him with the kite. Laurie is funny, and I like being able to laugh without feeling that the movie has invited me to look down on him. After two films spent enjoying Iannucci’s awful people, I’m glad to see how much he can do with people being kind to each other.
The storytelling does get away from him. Parts are unhinged at the expense of following what’s happening, while others are slow as molasses. There is a lot of novel left to deal with in the back half, and some of it gets hurried along just when I want to settle in. Remembering hints of the story helped me through the jumps, but I wouldn’t pretend the pacing works all the way through. It just didn’t stop me having a wonderful time.
Five stars. I liked the other two Iannucci films a hell of a lot, and this is my favorite.
(Benedict Wong should still be celebrated as a great cinematic drunk.)