Movie Review ~ Class Action Park

by Movie Review • Tags: , , , , , ,


The Facts:

Synopsis: Explores the legend, legacy, and truth behind the world’s most insane amusement park.

Stars: John Hodgman, Alison Becker, Chris Gethard

Directors: Seth Porges, Chris Charles Scott III

Rated: NR

Running Length: 89 minutes

TMMM Score: (8/10)

Review: I must have been born with an equilibrium that was out of whack because I’ve never felt the need for speed.  While my family and friends would count down the days until our local thrill park opened every summer, I would start to nervously think about the number of loops my stomach would make after taking my turn in whatever new upside-down steel contraption I’d get roped into riding.  The one area of the park that I always enjoyed was the water park because a waterslide was something I could handle and get some semblance of fun out of.  Maybe it was the anticipation that every ride ended with a literal splash and knowing I wouldn’t have to keep my eyes closed to enjoy it, but these created that zing of fun I never felt on any ride that didn’t require a swimsuit.

The best was when my family or summer activity group would make the trek an hour or so out of town to Wild Mountain which was almost exclusively a waterslide park.  Over time it would add a lazy river, Go-Karts, and Bumper Boats but when I first arrived it was just a bundle of slides offering various levels of thrills and the infamous Alpine Slide, a dry-ride that you had to take a ski-lift up the mountain to get to.  Oh, the days we spent there, going on endless runs down the waterslides before drying off on the chair lift eagerly riding to the top of the mountain for our smooth glide down on the Alpine Slide.

All the memories of my time at Wild Mountain came flooding back watching the new documentary Class Action Park, available to stream on HBO Max.  While I enjoyed numerous safe visits to my Minnesota oasis, the dangers of the New Jersey waterpark that was open from 1978 until 1996 is the stuff of lore.  Though the tale of the park had previously been loosely fictionalized in the 2018 Johnny Knoxville stunt comedy Action Point, directors Seth Porges and Chris Charles Scott III have gathered past employees, visitors, local residents, and others affected by the park’s raucous run to tell the whole truth about what it was really like to have lived through it all.  That some lived to tell their story could be seen as a miracle in and of itself.

The brainchild of former Wall Street investor Gene Mulvihill, Action Park was built on the site of two ski resorts and was intended to continue to bring in business during the summer months when resorts were typically quiet.  Growing quickly to a sprawling mecca that housed three distinct sections with everything from mini-speedboats to Go-Karts, a rapids ride and a gigantic wave pool – on paper the park appeared to be a paradise for kids looking for a good time.  It very well could have achieved what Mulvihill intended, for people pay admission and then be free to create their own entertainment experience within the dozens and dozens of thrill rides offered.  Featuring home grown entertainment that you couldn’t find anywhere else in the world, Action Park became known for their one-of-a-kind experiences.

So, how did Mulvihill’s huge amusement attraction earn the nicknames Traction Park, Accident Park, and, yes, Class Action Park over time?  For that, we turn to the former employees who recount the various safety measures that were ignored and recall horror stories of guests suffering ghastly injuries thanks to faulty equipment or poorly constructed rides that would literally fall apart.  As some of those interviewed who frequented the park remember, it almost became a right of passage to get hurt during a visit, a sign that you had arrived into a pseudo-adulthood.  Rides were designed for thrill, not function and would result in frequently dislocated shoulders, lost teeth, and lacerations from bodies scraping against said lost teeth that had become lodged in the rubber slide.  Guests would start fights in the middle of rides and finish them in the pool as hapless lifeguards watched, often to young or uninterested to intervene fully.  Then there’s the stories of visitors deliberately trying to injure others in bizarre (and, admittedly, hilariously mean-spirited) ways.

A good portion of the film is devoted to the war stories of these individuals yet all seem to consider their tenure as series of fond memories in some strange way.  For them, it was their first job and a chance to escape themselves from their own hormonal teenage years.  They were free from their parents and enjoyed a wild life when the park was closed.  Now parents themselves, it’s interesting to hear their reflections on how they’d react if their own children were heading off for a day at a similar theme park.  As is the case with many of these types of memory heavy documentaries, the themes get repetitive after a while but with so many areas of the park to cover and the insane number of unbelievable tales of survival to relay, the film doesn’t overstay its welcome past its short run time.

It’s a dramatic shift in the final twenty minutes that sets the movie slightly off kilter but it’s a necessary area the directors have to go to give a full picture of how Action Park forever changed the lives of its visitors.  Interviewing the family of the first person to die at the park, their story and how the park responded to the tragedy stands in stark contrast to the light-hearted tone of the previous hour.  It kicks off a somber final lap for the park and the film but in truth that’s the way the documentary was always going to end.  I wish there were more opinions gathered from the employees regarding their feelings about the individuals that died but perhaps for legal reasons the subject is only briefly covered and then only in mostly general terms.

Nicely narrated by John Hodgman and featuring good commentary throughout by comedian and former attendee Chris Gethard, Class Action Park wisely uses the majority of its run time to highlight the insanity on display in the New Jersey attraction.  We can look back and laugh at some of this now but when the narration details the average guest was often from a working class lower income background, you begin to see the appeal of the risks being taken but further question the morals of those offering it up in the first place.  Basically run by teenagers that barely could take care of themselves, how more people didn’t perish is beyond me.  As a time capsule of a less serious time, though, when summers were made up of trips to the waterpark mingling with large crowds, Class Action Park stands in stark contrast to the Twilight Zone summer we’ve all been getting through.

Movie Review ~ You Cannot Kill David Arquette

1
by Movie Review • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,


The Facts:

Synopsis: Following his infamous championship as part of a marketing stunt for the film Ready to Rumble, actor David Arquette returns to the professional wrestling ring for a series of matches.

Stars: David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Patricia Arquette, Rosanna Arquette, Ric Flair, Diamond Dallas Page, Christina McLarty Arquette, Jack Perry, Luke Perry, Jerry Lawler

Director: David Darg & Price James

Rated: NR

Running Length: 90 minutes

TMMM Score: (8/10)

Review:  Over the years, I’ve had a complicated relationship with the Arquette family.  For a while, when I was younger and browsing the video store I was totally confused over Rosanna (Draft Day) because the VHS cover of Desperately Seeking Susan made me think she was Madonna and vice versa.  What can I say, I was an easily confused child that didn’t see that particular film until I was an adult.  It wasn’t until the cult film The Big Blue arrived in 1988 that I finally figured out who she was and by that time I was already into Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors which starred her younger sister, Patricia.  Now this Arquette I really didn’t understand.  Over time, she’d occasionally pop up in something that would interest me but I largely found her a grating presence…until I saw 2014’s Boyhood in an early, early screening and knew right then and there it would win her an Oscar.  Father Lewis was a dependable character actor in so many movies including The China Syndrome and Waiting for Guffman and late sister Alexis also appeared in a fair share of eyebrow raising movies over the course of her career.

The really strange one, and I mean really strange, was David.  Now, I first remember him all the way back in the original film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer but he’s since become synonymous with both the Scream franchise and his future ex-wife Courteney Cox whom he met while filming the first of the four films (a fifth one is in the planning stages).  With the popularity of Scream, Arquette’s film career opened up and he became a go-to person for silly and outright stupid fare…pretty much anything Tom Green or Pauly Shore had turned down because they thought it was beneath them.  One such film was 2000’s wrestling comedy Ready to Rumble and that became a calling card pivot point of sorts because it was on that film where the producers of World Championship Wrestling did what some fans consider a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad thing.  They decided to fix it so Arquette (a huge wrestling fan in the real world) would be named WCW World Champion as a way to generate publicity for them and for the movie.  It didn’t go well.  Though Arquette donated all the money WCW had paid him for the stunt, the damage had been done and he became a joke within the wrestling industry and in some Hollywood circles.

The new documentary You Cannot Kill David Arquette takes a novel idea, that David could return to the wrestling world and do it for real this time, and creates something magical both for the viewer and for the actor himself.  Before the movie I considered Arquette to be a kind of clown.  Yes I admit it and I know that’s not a very nice thing to say sitting here from my perch in midwest MN.  Still, he’d fallen into a semi-slump in terms of high profile roles and suffered several medical and pharmaceutical setbacks in recent years and I just couldn’t take him that seriously.  At the beginning of the film, it appears that a lot of people were in my camp as well.  Even his no-nonsense, supportive wife Christina McLarty Arquette has serious doubts about Arquette’s plan to revive his wrestling character and give it another go in the ring.  I mean, the man had a heart attack but still pushes himself far past the limitations of endurance…sometimes just for a gag.

Directors David Darg and Price James follow Arquette over the next year and lets us watch as the actor suffers numerous beatdowns in amateur rings, south of the border lucha libre fights, and makes the rounds on the bloody indie deathmatch circuit.  It’s a brutal redemption tour and Arquette gamely puts his body, mind, and spirit to the test time and time again.  At first, I was sort of put off by the whole thing and found Arquette to be another washed up star looking for that final four minutes of fast fame.  Then, I dunno, something clicked and I saw the concerned people he was surrounding himself with and the sincerity in which he listened to their thoughts.  There’s a sadness in him that eventually becomes a winning quality and it transforms him from the outside in.  The Arquette at the end of the movie is totally different than the beginning…and I think the same goes for this viewer’s opinion of the actor himself.

With brief appearances from his ex-wife, sisters, and even the late Luke Perry in the kind of misty-eyed cameo you may only realize happened after the fact, You Cannot Kill David Arquette is a very Hollywood documentary that reaches far beyond the confines of the city for its best material.  Watching Arquette (also appearing in the recently released Spree) travel around the country to Podunk towns with makeshifts wrestling rings that fall apart on impact, you marvel at his willingness to put himself out there…and to be filmed while doing it.  In the end, it’s compulsive and oddly compassionate filmmaking that taps out at just the right time.

Movie Review ~ Centigrade

by Movie Review • Tags: , , , , , , ,


The Facts:

Synopsis: A married couple find themselves trapped in their frozen vehicle after a blizzard and struggle to survive amid plunging temperatures and unforeseen obstacles.

Stars: Genesis Rodriguez, Vincent Piazza, Mavis Simpson-Ernst

Director: Brendan Walsh

Rated: NR

Running Length: 89 minutes

TMMM Score: (6/10)

Review:  Some people say that it’s never as fun to watch suspense movies alone as it is to turn off all the lights and hunker down with another person.  I could go both ways with that.  If you’re watching with someone that can handle the scares and will go along for the ride, sure, that’s fun but if you’re in the presence of an unwilling participant that’s going to make light of the frights as a way to relieve their own fears, then you’re in for a long 90 minutes.  Then there are the thrillers that sort of demand you have another viewer with you so you can commiserate on the people in the film and that’s where it’s always handy to know who you’re watching with.

I had intended to watch Centigrade all by my lonesome because it looked to be the kind of chilly thriller fare my partner just doesn’t go for but he stuck around for the first few minutes of this based-on-true-life events and was intrigued enough to put his feet up and hang out for a while.  This was a good thing for two reasons.  The first is I was glad he was around so I could vent my frustration at the situation the lone couple featured in the film find themselves in and the second was that this turned out to be one of those interesting relationship-building movies where you find yourself asking how you’d react if you were in the same situation with your significant other.

After stopping in the middle of the night on the side of a mountain road due to bad weather conditions, pregnant writer Naomi (Genesis Rodriguez, Man on a Ledge) and her husband Matt (Vincent Piazza, Jersey Boys) awake to find the blizzard they were in has covered their vehicle with ice and snow, fully trapping them in their rental car.  In Norway to promote her book, no one knows precisely where they were on this leg of their trip and with no cell phone reception, they aren’t even sure how far they were from their hotel when they pulled over.  Reasonably consoloed someone will be coming by their frozen fortress soon, they wait.  And wait.  The waiting turns to panic as they realize they are entombed in ice on a desolate stretch of road and with limited supplies may not be rescued for days.

At first, the couple is observant of the needs of their spouse and tries their best to accommodate the little things that might annoy them otherwise in consideration of the situation.  The space they have to move around in is small, though, and before long paranoia creeps in and begins to unravel husband and wife as the days stretch on and all hope seems lost.  When they disagree on how to move forward and with Naomi’s pregnancy coming to the forefront of their worry, bold choices have to be made that could end up being the difference between a cold death in the elements if they break free or a slow decline in the car if they choose to stay where they are.  Staying in the car has created an igloo effect which is keeping them relatively secure but would breaking a window and chancing the urge to dig their way out help their overall odds?

I’d imagine watching Centigrade with your loved one might inspire some debate over who is the in the right as the film progresses.  I definitely found myself talking back to the screen more than I had at other films lately and found that I alternated sides with Matt and Naomi throughout…the more they came to loggerheads the deeper I tended to dig my heels in for either party.  That should say something for both the performances of Rodriguez and Piazza and the writing of director Brendan Walsh and Daley Nixon.  While I could see this being written off as a one-note slog that begins to swallow itself into wallow territory around the 60 minute mark, I found it oddly compelling viewing…even when my thoughts drifted to thinking about where all the #2’s were being put.

Neither actor is any kind of household name but they both have the kind of movie-star looks that keep them from truly portraying “real” people.  Piazza tends to fly fairly under the radar and some attempts by Walsh and Nixon to flesh out his backstory don’t pan out as intended but he has a good chemistry with Rodriguez.  For her part, Rodriguez is saddled with a strangely half-explored medication issue but still manages to keep the fires of interest burning when things start to get cold in the final stretch.  I wish there were a few more of the heated exchanges we get early on in the film between the two but the need to conserve energy realistically sadly outweighs the desire for more dramatic tension and the liveliness peters out to a few random blips as Walsh moves the film toward its predictable conclusion.

While it could have tightened up a bit more heading into its last act, Centigrade makes for a mostly taut 90 minutes that could also double as a bit of easy couples shout therapy.  At several points, I was thankful that Walsh and Nixon’s script was so sparse because it gave us a chance to discuss what we’d do in the same situation…and then argue with one another as to why the other person’s plan wouldn’t work.  Lack of propulsive drive forward may knock it down a few degrees, but Centigrade is still good for a few chills.

Movie Review ~ Robin’s Wish

by Movie Review • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,


The Facts:

Synopsis: An intimate portrait of Robin Williams and his invulnerable spirit, Robin’s Wish is the story of what really happened to one of the greatest entertainers of all time – and what his mind was fighting.

Stars: Susan Schneider Williams, Shawn Levy, John R. Montgomery, Rick Overton, David E. Kelly

Director: Tylor Norwood

Rated: NR

Running Length: 77 minutes

TMMM Score: (6.5/10)

Review:  Some days you’ll never forget.  The day Robin Williams died was one of them.  I know that it may sound strange in the grand scheme of life to mourn a celebrity death but Robin was one of the first stars I remember growing up knowing and recognizing.  Encountering him while I was a child as the Genie in Aladdin and the title character in Mrs. Doubtfire to becoming an adult and graduating to his less funny work in Insomnia and One-Hour Photo, I felt like I could chart my life, certainly my movie-going life, though him.  So thinking back to that day in August of 2014 when I got a text that asked me if I’d heard that Robin Williams had died will always bring a flush to my cheeks.  That night, I watched The Birdcage because I hadn’t seen it in forever and I wanted something that represented him well – solid comedy, solid heart.

In the days, months, weeks, and years since Robin left us, we’ve learned more about what he was suffering with that led him to commit suicide at the age of 63.  Though many assumed at first it was due to drugs or depression, it was revealed that although Robin had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease it was actually Lewy body dementia that likely led him to take his own life.  The implications of this are complicated and complex, requiring far more information that can be provided in a simple movie review.  Still, it gave a name and an explanation to what many of his close family and friends had been unable to pinpoint until after he was gone.

In the new documentary Robin’s Wish, Robin’s widow Susan Schneider Williams and director Tylor Norwood lay out this diagnosis and provide informative details about the series of events that, in hindsight, showed as early warning signs.  Interviews with several of those that knew him well in addition to neighbors in Marin, CA where he called home most of the time further color in the lines of the Robin off-camera that many of us didn’t see.  It’s a sweet, if not all-together enlightening, look at the actor that was beloved by many but struggled valiantly in his final years to stay afloat.

Those seeking an in-depth overall look at the life and times of Robin Williams won’t find it here, that’s been covered and done well in the 2018 documentary Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind as well as several nicely researched biographies.  Although a brief overview of his early days at Julliard with classmate Christopher Reeve and their lasting friendship is mentioned, the majority of the film follows his later years with Schneider Williams, his third wife who he married in 2011.  More of a memory book on their life than anything, it definitely paints a picture of serenity in their union and how much they meant to each other…but it’s notable that none of his children are interviewed, seen, or even mentioned at all.  There’s not even a whisper of them when Schneider Williams was recalling how devastated Robin was when he found himself in failing health.  It all just seems, well, odd.  Like a piece of a difficult puzzle had been purposely left out.

What was nice to see were memories of Robin not from the usual suspects.  Instead of gathering a host of celebrities and recognizable names, Norwood interviews next-door neighbors, cycling buddies, and old comedy friends from back in the day.  Again, maybe this was something to read further into but I found it nice to hear from others that didn’t know Robin from the red carpet or movie sets but from seeing him walking his dog or taking out his trash.  Sometimes that’s when you get to know a person the best.  The film takes a sharp turn as it heads toward the finish line when it shifts to being all about Schneider Williams and her efforts to bring awareness to Lewy body dementia.  The jaded critic in me felt this smacked of infomercial-level filmmaking but there’s still a sincerity to her that appealed to me on a personal level.

Robin Williams left a large gap in the hearts of many movie fans and a larger one in those of his loved ones.  The movie never quite makes it clear what his “wish” was but raising awareness for this tragic disorder would surely be something he’d be a supporter of.  The film takes time to show his efforts with the USO and wounded veterans and his time with Comic Relief is well-documented.  It’s sad that he’s not here to help in the fight for a cure but perhaps this tiny film will inspire greater visibility to the cause.

Movie Review ~ Get Duked!

by Movie Review • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


The Facts:

Synopsis: Deep in the Scottish Highlands on a camping trip competition, four city boys try to escape a mysterious huntsman while the police trail behind, failing to provide assistance.

Stars: Eddie Izzard, Kate Dickie, James Cosmo, Kevin Guthrie, Jonathan Aris, Alice Lowe, Samuel Bottomley, Viraj Juneja, Rian Gordon, Lewis Gribben, Brian Pettifer, Georgie Glen

Director: Ninian Doff

Rated: R

Running Length: 87 minutes

TMMM Score: (6/10)

Review:  A fun bit of movie trivia that always interests me is finding out the original titles of films that either went into production under a different name or saw their title get changed after their original festival run.  Most of the time, the change is for the better.  Would we still be talking about Alien today if it had been released as Star Beast?  How about imagining seeing Charlize Theron in Coldest City instead of Atomic Blonde?  Would Julia Roberts star turn in Pretty Woman had the same seismic impact if it came out as 3000?  Don’t even get me started with Warner Brothers desperately trying to get Tim Burton to swap out Beetlejuice for their preferred alternate House Ghosts.

A few months back, I reviewed and recommended The Shadow of Violence which was previously released and seen in its early film festival runs as the more interesting Calm with Horses and this week sees the debut of another film on Prime Video that’s had a title swap on its way to a wide release.  Filmed originally as Boyz in the Woods, Amazon Studios picked up the film after it played well at last year’s South by Southwest Film Festival and promptly gave it a new name.  While Get Duked! leans into the more playful aspects the viewing experience has to offer and steers clear from sounding like a sketchy film you may not want showing up in your queue, it also exposes some of the problems at the forefront of the movie that’s about as one-joke as they come.

Prior to firing Get Duked! up I had no awareness of the The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award which was started a half-century ago by the Queen’s husband and meant to attract youth that hadn’t yet found their group/club to join.  Designed to promote participation in volunteering, physical fitness, and an expedition to achieve the top rank, it has spread through more than a hundred countries since its inception.  So…clearly, it’s a big deal.  I’d imagine also, at least based on writer/director Ninian Doff’s wacky screenplay, it’s a program that draws some level of ribbing because the jokes at play in Get Duked! feel remarkably on pointe and specifically taking aim at several organizations throughout.

Doff gets things off on the right foot by staging an enjoyably cheeky first 1/3 that introduces us to the three slacker mates forced into participation for The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award by their teacher Mr. Carlyle (Jonathan Arias, Vivarium) and the one nerd-ish lad who was more than eager to volunteer.  While the three are hoping to find cell phone reception and a place to get high the moment the adult is out of sight, Ian, the sweet-natured fourth (Samuel Bottomley, Ghost Stories), just wants to make new friends and end the weekend with the Duke’s prize to top it off.  Ian learns quickly that Dean (Rian Gordon), Duncan (Lewis Gribben) and William aka DJ Beatroot (Viraj Juneja) have no outdoor experience (or many brain cells) and rely on him to get them through the terrain toward their final destination.

The four have more to worry about than mossy rocks and spoiled haggis though, because what they don’t know at first is that they’re the new prey for hunters out to “cull the herd” of the misspent youth in society and this weekend will be more about survival than they could have ever imagined.  Who is hunting them is a mystery that is solved fairly quickly – it’s a rather famous royal played by Eddie Izzard (The High Note) who has an even more famous wife as his accomplice.  At the same time, the local police led by Sergeant Morag (Kate Dickie, Prometheus) are attempting to apprehend a local bread thief (no joke) and somehow manage to get tangled up in the boys flight from their hunters, which only complicates matters in oddly decreasingly funny ways.  The more that Doff’s screenplay brings these disparate characters together, the funnier it should get, but to me it became less and less interesting instead.  It’s never as crackling as it is in those first 40 minutes and even brief moments of fun (a musical moment featuring DJ Beatroot and a crowd of blissed out country folk is gold) can’t quite drag the film back into alignment.

Now, I’m sure Get Duked! is going to play to crowds looking for that fun Friday night comedy like gangbusters and maybe it’s my problem for watching it on a late afternoon early in the week.  It’s one that has a bit of a party vibe to it, one that allows you to be distracted from the one-joke premise that gets old quickly and can’t hide that the endeavor would have worked better as a short or part of a larger anthology.  It must be said, though, that there’s no shortage of style or creativity in filmmaking and performers, especially Juneja as a freestyle rapper with flow but no show, are great.  Yet I never fully found myself loving it and that began to nag at me after awhile because it reminded me a lot of better movies like Shaun of the Dead, The World’s End, or Hot Fuzz.  Unlike those films, Get Duked! has a one-joke premise that it sticks to, for better or for worse.

Movie Review ~ The Personal History of David Copperfield

by Movie Review • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


The Facts:

Synopsis: A fresh and distinctive take on Charles Dickens’ semi-autobiographical masterpiece, chronicles the life of its iconic title character as he navigates a chaotic world to find his elusive place within it.

Stars: Dev Patel, Aneurin Barnard, Peter Capaldi, Morfydd Clark, Daisy May Cooper, Rosalind Eleazar, Hugh Laurie, Tilda Swinton, Ben Whishaw, Paul Whitehouse

Director: Armando Iannucci

Rated: PG

Running Length: 119 minutes

TMMM Score: (8.5/10)

Review:  Right about the time this pandemic hit and the country shut down, I was closing on a condo my partner and I were set to take our time painting and moving into with the help of our friends and family.  Now, this new social distancing term and all that went with it meant that our friends couldn’t help us move or be with us to paint so we were on our own.  To while away the hours slapping primer and two coats on the entire place, we decided to go all literary and listen to Jane Austen’s Emma because it was a rare Austen neither of us had read.  As a reward not just for toiling away in Behr Eggshell over the course of several weeks but for getting through the novel, we movie buffs thought it a good idea to make our way through the filmed versions of Emma before watching the 2020 version that arrived this year because, well, there couldn’t be that many to get through right?  Wrong. So wrong.

Watching the various versions of Austen’s tale come to life so soon after reading the book illustrated that there were different ways to breathe energy into a novel but that it’s all based on interpretation.  There was a four-and-a-half-hour version of Emma that in some ways moved faster than the 1996 much-loved Gwyneth Paltrow version.  You also can’t forget 1995’s Clueless which we all know was writer/director Amy Heckerling’s loosely inspired modernization of the classic.  It all goes to show that you can have your Austen fancy or you can have your Austen cool but when the characters are written so well to begin with no amount of fussing around with them is going to totally ruin the heart of the piece.

So, why all this talk about Emma in a discussion of a new view of Charles Dickens David Copperfield?  Well, it’s to address off the bat that this isn’t going to be the David Copperfield you have come to expect from your BBC adaptations or your Masterpiece Theater Sunday evening appointment television showings.  While certainly not in any way a faithful adaptation of a novel Dickens published in 1850 and was known to be his favorite, The Personal History of David Copperfield is a richly realized one that rather blithely removes the most despondent pieces and revels in the fanciful.  It also wisely knows the difference between modernization and revisionism and walks the line between the two with ease.  The result is one of the most surprising and surprisingly entertaining films of the year.

Director Armando Iannucci is likely a familiar name to those that followed the HBO series Veep.  As the creator and showrunner for the first four seasons, he helped establish that political satire and its irreverent humor so I went into this film expecting it to have that same fast style and brusque energy.  The quick interplay was there and it definitely has the energy that I’ve come to expect from Iannucci but not in that same kind of rough and hot to the touch feel it has had before.  It’s softer here and allows the story to be propelled forward by the characters and their choices, not by plot machinations.  That’s a significant achievement when you’re working within a storyline where a seemingly endless set of maladies befall our leading man throughout.

For those unfamiliar, David Copperfield is the story of a young man (Dev Patel, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) who spends the majority of his growing up years encountering one set of colorful characters after another.  At his birth, his arch aunt (Tilda Swinton, Suspiria) arrives to assist but leaves promptly when she discovers he is not a girl.  His young, widowed mother (Morfydd Clark, Crawl) marries again, this time to a wicked man with an even more wicked sister (Gwendoline Christie, Welcome to Marwen) and soon he’s living with an always in-debt landlord (Peter Capaldi, World War Z).  During a brief stay with his aunt he’s introduced to her eccentric cousin (Hugh Laurie, Tomorrowland) before enrolling in a respected school where he meets lifelong friend James Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard, The Goldfinch) and first encounters the meek but not mild Uriah Heep (Ben Whishaw, Little Joe).  He’s loved from afar by Agnes (Rosalind Eleazar) and pursues dotty Dora (also played by Clark) all the while hoping to secure his future happiness.

There’s a lot for Iannucci and co-writer Simon Blackwell to cover in two hours and it’s a remarkable accomplishment that they managed to cram as much story in as they do.  Obviously, some of it has to go and a good chunk of the book’s latter half is missing, with several storylines either combined or excised.  What’s been removed are the sallower portions of Dickens novel, leaving the remaining moments more light-hearted and vibrant.  One could argue that the characters needed a little more strife but Iannucci and Blackwell give David and his extended family a fair amount of business to overcome.  The villains in a Dickens story are always of the scheming and grasping variety, making them perfect for the likes of icy Christie and the gleeful apathy of Whishaw.

Along with the sharp writing, Iannucci has cast the film with a spectacular amount of top-tier talent and it all starts with Patel’s nicely metered approach to the title character.  Patel is an actor that has grown on me greatly over the years and continues to get better with each new role he takes.  I also especially liked Jairaj Varsani as the young David, showing again that its possible to play precocious without losing your audience to alienation.   As usual, Swinton mines every syllable and skin cell for maximum effect, and you simply can’t end 2020 without seeing her go crazy over a persistent donkey presence on her property.   If the film has a drawback, it’s that it’s so packed with welcome faces in episodic segments you don’t always feel you’ve rounded out the corners with each character before they’ve vanished for good.  That goes for the strong supporting players as well, many of whom have but a few lines/scenes to make an impression yet manage to leave an indelible on in their wake.

Purists may scoff and, honestly, I see their point in some way, but there’s an abundance of joy in these 120 minutes that have been hard to come by.  That’s something celebrate and not over-analyze.  A week after the extremely nasty and unpleasant Unhinged became the first film to re-open theaters, here comes The Personal History of David Copperfield on its heels to remind the rest of us what possibilities there are on the big screen…though it works just as well on the small one too.  I was thankfully able to screen this one from my home and would not have reviewed it otherwise.  Please, decide carefully if venturing into theaters is the right choice for you as well as anyone in your home that you may be returning to.