Of all his novels, David Copperfield was closest to Charles Dickens's heart -- because it was partly a memoir of his own childhood life.
David Copperfield is dragged through his early years by an oppressive stepfather, put to work in a blacking factory (as was Dickens himself when his father was put into a debtors' prison) and finds relative freedom only when 'adopted' by his maiden aunt, Betsey Trotwood.
But that's only half the story of David Copperfield. after winning through the privations of childhood, he must strike out to succeed in the gruelling endurance-course that was Victorian England.
This is an excellent-in-parts television adaptation -- the excellent parts coming through the casting of Maggie Smith as Betsey Trotwood, and Bob Hoskins as the sunny, fiscally irresponsible incurable optimist Mr Micawber. And the very young Daniel Radcliffe, in his pre-Hogwarts days, is excellent and touchingly believable as the young David Copperfield.
The script is sound, and the direction seems for the most part assured. For me, the weakness comes in the casting of the insipid, vapid Ciaran McMenamin as the adult David Copperfield. If he can act, he certainly doesn't seem in this instance to respond to the director's instructions - Copperfield's firm resolve seems instead to be flaccid inactivity; his dtrengths are a skin-deep charade.
Yet I found myself enjoying this adaptation despite the rotten casting at its core. It is a quality production -- and hopefully, not all viewers will react to the central character as I did.
This is an excellent anamorphic widescreen transfer. I seem to have said that about almost everything I've reviewed of late. You still come across the occasional total bummer of a transfer, but by and large, the quality of DVDs coming onto the market nowadays is very high, and dependent only on the age of the source material. Pan-and-scan seems to be dead and buried, thank god!
This disc has a 20-minute making of feature which is even shallower than the usual -- it focuses on the actress Pauline Quirk who plays young Copperfield's faithful servant Peggotty - she has absolutely nothing of interest to say about anything.
The soundtrack is Dolby stereo, and is crisp, with maximum clarity provided to the dialogue.
And there is an additional audio feature giving us 30 minutes of the music composed by Rob Lane for the adaptation, and heard here in 5.1 Surround. It's sound, workmanlike television program music.