Review
NICHOLAS NICKLEBY
Starring Charlie Hunnam, Christopher Plummer and Jim Broadbent
Written and directed by Douglas McGrath
Opens Friday, January 24
Plaza Theatre
It’s no death of Little Nell, but gentle-hearted readers will still shudder when they see the hatchet job required to turn Nicholas Nickleby, Charles Dickens’s sprawling satire of greed and class in early Victorian London, into a 130-minute movie.
After all, the 1982 TV version of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s famous stage production runs to nearly nine hours. With so much of the original summarized and excised, Douglas McGrath’s new adaptation can’t help but seem like a tatty Cliffs Notes with half the pages torn out.
But as he proved with his skilful film of Jane Austen’s Emma, McGrath knows how the right cast can restore some lustre to a literary classic that’s had a tumultuous journey to the screen. In other words, the actors in Nicholas Nickleby make the most of a thin batch of gruel. A star of the original Queer as Folk, Charlie Hunnam plays the title role of a young man who comes to London after his death of his father. Nicholas asks his wealthy uncle Ralph (Christopher Plummer) to help care for his bereaved mother and sister. The nefarious Ralph obliges, beginning a campaign of chicanery that involves sending Nicholas to work in a horrific boys’ academy and tempting prospective business partners with the virginal Kate (Romola Garai).
The tale has many tragic turns, but McGrath and his cast largely forego the high-minded dolefulness of the RSC production in favour of camp theatrics. Indeed, this is a queerer sort of Nickleby than the one you may have read, what with Nathan Lane and Barry "Dame Edna" Humphries appearing as the leaders of the Crummles theatrical troupe and Alan Cumming as a moustachioed Highland dancer.
The catty exchanges between Ralph and his clerk Mr. Noggs (Tom Courtenay) are curiously fraught with suggestion, as are the rapturous glances between Nicholas and Smike (Jamie Bell), the crippled boy he rescues from the academy, which ain’t called Dotheboys Hall for nothing. However fleeting, such flashes of flamboyance convey the wit and power of the text more successfully than McGrath’s harried stabs at Dickensian sentimentality. |
