It is hard
not to be won over by the intoxicating chipperness of Douglas
McGrath’s adaptation of Charles Dickens voluminous Nicholas
Nickleby. Granted, I had to get past the notion this film is
nothing more than 130 minutes of Cliff’s Notes first. It hits
all the highpoints, running along from moment to moment knowing
full well there isn’t time to delve into anything approaching
nuance or subtlety. Still, this isn’t the Royal Shakespeare
Company, and I doubt an audience could handle eight hours of
Dickens in one sitting.
The movie
is fun. I was swept away by Nickleby’s charm
almost right away, just about the time young Nicholas (Abandon’s
Charlie Hunnam) and his mother (Stella Gonet) and sister Kate (Ramola
Garai) first meet up with their nefarious uncle Ralph
(Christopher Plummer). From that moment on, Plummer playing his
inhuman creation with a near Snidley Whipplash glee (all that is
missing is the long black mustache), McGrath and his movie had
me deeply under their spell.
The junior
Nickleby and his family have come to their rich relative for
help, the elder Nickleby’s tragic death leaving the family with
little more than debt. For his own reasons, Ralph is compelled
to assist his wayward relatives, sending Nicholas away to work
as an assistant teacher in a far-from London boy’s school and
finding his sister and mother work in a local district as
seamstresses.
Upon
arriving at the school, Nicholas discovers this is not the place
of learning and growth he had been led to believe by the
institution’s headmaster Wackford Squeers (Broadbent). Instead,
it is a place where the children are kept in the most horrendous
of conditions – they sleep in small coffin-like enclosures
filled with hay – and the only growth being promoted is that of
Squeers and his family’s pocketbook.
Soon the
wayward young man takes pity upon a crippled servant boy named
Smike (Billy
Elliott’s Jamie Bell giving the films most haunting
performance) bringing him under his wing. Nicholas bonds with
the boy becoming the family Smike’s never known, realizing
quickly he must take him far away from this place of horror and
torture before Squeers and his wife (Juliet Stevenson) kill him
with their continuous abuse.
Hitting
the open road back towards London, Nicholas and Smike come upon
a menagerie of eccentric and eclectic characters, not the least
of which being Vincent Crummels (Nathan Lane) and his band of
actors. They welcome the duo into their group with open arms,
going so far as to cast them both in an upcoming staging of
Romeo & Juliet.
There is
so much going on in Nicholas Nickleby that it would take
a review the size of small novel to go through it all. That
McGrath, a frequent collaborator of Woody Allen’s (Bullet’s
Over Broadway) and the writer/director of another British
classic -- the 1996 Gwyneth Paltrow film Emma, has
managed to par Dickens’ 900-plus page work down to a
serviceable-yet-still-coherent length is in itself commendable.
That he’s managed to create such feathery entertainment that
tickles and glistens along even more so. I couldn’t escape,
however, the feeling that new and evolving plot points were
bursting from the seems, and the final twenty minutes is so
crammed with material that if I weren’t on my toes keeping notes
I’m sure it would have been bewildering.
No matter.
There is a hugely theatrical flourish to it all that is, if not
completely successful, amusing enough to bring on a smile. The
casting helps, Hunnam being surprisingly successful as the
quietly strong and determined title character. Plummer adds fair
amounts of depth and pathos to a character that could have been
strictly one-note, while Broadbent, Lane, Stevenson, Barry
Humphries (Dame Edna Everage), Tom Courtenay Alan Cumming and
Edward Fox all deliver lively turns in limited time.
Don’t get
me wrong – Nicholas Nickleby is not the greatest literary
adaptation I’ve seen by any means. It’s thin, and McGrath
wouldn’t know subtlety if it bit him on the butt. Still, it’s
entertaining enough, and the two-plus hours the film runs fly
by. More so, it revels in the glory and wonder of the characters
and world Dickens created, so much so I couldn’t wait to run out
and jump right into the author’s work once again. In fact,
Great Expectations sits in my purse right now, perfect
reading for a cold winter’s day, just as this movie is delicious
fun for those self-same long winter nights.
