Charles Dicken's famous novel David Coppefield is set to receive a $30 million big screen adaptation with Mr. Bean's Holiday star Rowan Atkinson attached for a supporting role. He will play Mr. Micawber the landlord of Copperfield, a comic secondary character in the tale. The movie will see Atkinson re-team with Johnny English director Peter Howitt who will also be producing the movie through his company Flaming Pie Films. Remarkably for such a famous tale, Hollywood has only once used the story for a movie once before which was way back in 1935 from director George Cukor and starring W.C. Fields in the role Atkinson will have in this new version. Of course, the same can't be said for small screen adaptations... of which there have been far too many to count. Producer Richard Johns spoke to Variety...
"This is a very fresh adaptation of the novel, not the chocolate-boxy, stolid version of Dickens that we are used to," Johns said. "It won't be mannered or reverential. With Dickens, filmmakers have been trapped in this place where you have caricatured characters, but Peter wants to deal with them like real people."
So a movie that deals with the famous characters as "real people" either means that the movie will be a gritty boring mess, or actually a tale that we can all relate to and enjoy. I do like the over-the-top Dicken's adaptation sometimes, but we have seen far too many of those in the past. I absolutely loved what Roman Polanski did with his Olivier Twist movie, where he blended both the fantasy aspect and the grittiness really well. More of that for David Copperfield, and I will be very intrigued.