NICHOLAS NICKELBY is a perfect entertainment. Its got comedy, drama, romance and a moral. Enacted by a sterling cast from a literate script, it captures the spirit of Dickens without a misstep in its 108 minute running time.
The eponymous hero of the piece is the noble but impoverished Nicholas. He is left an orphan at 19 with a mother and a sister to care for after his father makes an unwise investment leaving the investors broke and the stockbrokers with villas in Italy. Shades of Enron.
To make his way in the world, he turns to his Uncle Ralph, a wealthy man whose made his money speculating on the market and feeding off the misery of others. As you might expect, the help, when it is offered, is less than helpful, leaving Nicholas far from home at one of those bleak boarding schools in Yorkshire with which Victorian literature is rife, this one with the ominous name of Dotheboys. His sister, the winsome Romola Garai, left without her brothers protection, is all but sold into white slavery by Uncle Ralph in an effort to attract investors and become even more stupendously rich. And thats all in the first 15 minutes or so. From there the tale progresses from one adventure to another as Nicholas and his sidekick Smike, work their way back to London, a middle-class life, and a final confrontation with Uncle Ralph.
Charlie Hunnam, Nathan from the British version of QUEER AS FOLK (also known as the only version that counts), projects an unaffected sweetness as Nicholas, but a sweetness backed up with the fortitude to right wrongs when necessary. With an open face and what one character aptly terms a smile like a sugar drop, hes the perfect romantic hero to Anne Hathaways romantic heroine. Hathaway is all the more impressive at the meek and innocent maiden frightened of life after her turn in THE PRINCESS DIARIES where she nimbly executed daring pratfalls with an assurance to make the Flying Wallendas jealous.
And its a good thing that theyre so good because the rest of the cast is nothing less than an embarrassment of riches, starting with Christopher Plummer as Uncle Ralph. He brings the blasé malevolence of a man who has so long concerned himself with money that people have become just another commodity. He also invest the character with an inner life, making him interesting as well as evil. Jamie Bell, so nimble in BILLY ELIOT, is quietly heartbreaking as the crippled boy that Nicholas rescues from starvation and beatings at Dotheboys. At the other end of the spectrum is Nathan Lane, as the paterfamilias of the Crummles family theater troupe with Barrie Humphries, in non-Dame Edith drag,.as his good wife, and Alan Cumming as the companys frustrated Scotsman. Rounding out the cast are Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, Tom Courtney, Juliet Stevenson, each doing a superb job of embodying Dickens’ deliciously eccentric character and any one of whom alone is worth the price of admission.
McGraths script preserves the intoxicatingly rich language of Dickenss novel while keeping up a pace that is as exuberant as the plot lines. The art direction captures the squalor and splendor of Victorian England with the same unblinking honesty that Dickens employed. A tailor shop specializing in mourning attire has as its sign the effigies of dead babies in a coffin; Uncle Ralphs home is an extravagant museum of stuffed birds and mounted eggs. And though the book, if faithfully reproduced scene by scene, would run to several hours, there is no sense of anything missing in the film. The whole stands on its own with a compact integrity.
NICHOLAS NICKELBY has one other thing going for it. You can take pretty much the whole family, save for one discreet scene of immediate post-partum, theres nothing to ruffle the feathers of the most prudish Puritan, nor anything that will be less than a complete delight to everyone.
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