NICHOLAS NICKLEBY
Astute adaptation of Dickens’ classic is the family film of the season.
Rated PG (nothing offensive). Running time: 132 minutes. At the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.
DOUG McGrath’s delightful version of Charles Dickens’ 1839 novel “Nicholas Nickleby” is a triumph of intelligent adaptation. It shows again how well the great Victorian storyteller translates to film, and makes enjoyable use of a generally first-rate cast.
Dickens lovers may be shocked at all the characters and subplots sacrificed to fit the 700-page novel to slightly more than two hours of screen time. (The celebrated stage version of the early ’80s with Roger Rees lasted 9½ hours.)
But writer-director McGrath (“Emma”) so clearly gets what’s wonderful about Dickens – his occasionally savage humor in particular – that you all but forget their absence.
He also understands where Dickens is coming from. The movie captures both his acute sense of the vulnerability of the poor – especially children – in a ruthlessly commercial society, and his anger at derelict parents and others who mistreat the young.
In one way McGrath improves on the original: It’s not easy for modern audiences to come to terms with the goodness and the generous sense of human brotherhood that Dickens illustrates through Nickleby.
But McGrath ensures that that goodness is less treacly than it seems in the book, in part by the unsentimentality with which he illustrates the alternative: a world of relentless human predation.
Nicholas Nickleby (Charlie Hunnam) is 19 when his country gentleman father dies, having recently lost the family fortune to unwise specu-lation. Nicholas takes his mother and sister Kate (Romola Garai) down to London to ask his wealthy stockbroker uncle, Ralph Nickleby (the superb Christopher Plummer), for assistance.
Ralph finds shopwork for the two women and sends Nicholas to be a teacher at Dotheboys Hall, a grim Yorkshire boarding school for unwanted boys run by the abusive Wackford Squeers (Jim Broadbent) and his even more sadistic wife (Juliet Stevenson).
Nicholas is horrified by the conditions in the school and in particular by the Squeers’ treatment of Smike (Jamie Bell), a crippled youth whom they’ve turned into a slave after his benefactors ceased to pay school fees.
After standing up to the Squeerses, Nicholas flees with Smike, intending to make his way down to London, where Uncle Ralph has forced Kate into a degrading position, using her as sexual bait for wealthy investors.
The film’s main flaw is in casting Hunnam as Nicholas. A big, slightly oafish blond, he seems to have been hired mostly for his looks: At times he almost seems to be struggling with the English language itself.
Plummer, on the other hand, could not be better as the villainous Ralph Nickleby, delivering a performance fully deserving of an Oscar nomination.
Also excellent are Broadbent and Stevenson, who bring a creepily sexual undertone to their relationship.
Nathan Lane as the flamboyant theatrical impresario Crummles has never been better or more restrained on film, and Alan Cumming and Timothy Spall are a pleasure, as always.