The U.S. trailer has arrived for director Armando Iannucci’s Charles Dickens adaptation, The Personal History of David Copperfield. Adapted from the classic Dickens novel David Copperfield, the film stars Dev Patel as the eponymous character, a young man who overcomes a childhood of impoverishment in order to pursue a career as a writer in Victorian-era England. Patel is joined onscreen by a big-name cast that includes Tilda Swinton, Benedict Wong, and Gwendoline Christie, in addition to Iannucci’s The Thick of It and Avenue 5 stars Peter Capaldi and Hugh Laurie. Behind the camera, the movie further reunites Iannucci with his frequent co-writer, Simon Blackwell.
Iannucci’s Dickens adaptation has already begun its theatrical rollout overseas, hitting the UK in January after its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall. Reviews have been great for the film so far, with critics praising The Personal History of David Copperfield’s diverse ensemble of talented actors and clever re-imagination of its source material. With its U.S. release date coming up in May, distributor Searchlight Pictures is getting its promotional campaign up and running.
The domestic trailer for The Personal History of David Copperfield dropped online today, shortly after the promo for the Patel-led retelling of The Green Knight made its way online. You can check out the former in the space below.
Smartly, this new trailer combines footage from The Personal History of David Copperfield with positive review pull-quotes, in a bid to further entice U.S. audiences to take a shot on this particular Dickenson re-imagining. The clips are full of Iannucci and Blackwell’s well-known dark and quirky sense of humor, be it the scene where David is (very) awkwardly informed his mother’s died to Swinton as Davis’ eccentric aunt, Betsey Trotwood, chasing off a person riding a donkey or getting into a slapping match. Satire was always a key element of Dickenson’s work when it came to portraying the English upper-class, yet he often combined social commentary with earnest storytelling (as perhaps best exemplified by A Christmas Carol). In that sense, it’s no surprise a satirist like Iannucci would prove to be a good mach for the subject matter in The Personal History of David Copperfield.
Between The Personal History of David Copperfield and Green Knight, audiences will have their pick of promising Dev Patel literary re-tellings to choose from this May. Neither film is expected to make a massive dent at the box office, but should appeal to those seeking an alternative to the blockbusters and studio movies (be it Marvel’s Black Widow or Spiral: From the Book of Saw) releasing that month. Searchlight Pictures was a major player on the arthouse circuit during their time with Fox and that shouldn’t change in the immediate wake of their rebranding, either. With films like The Personal History of David Copperfield, they’re already on their way to proving their mettle.
Source: Searchlight Pictures
