It’s a little tough for me to groove with a movie where everyone is exactly what they look like and, having displayed a character trait such as slapping a lame boy, never vary from your first impression of them. I mean, what fun is it if the whimpering, enslaved, crippled boy is purely kind and loving and noble and never once, like, kicks a puppy or so much as sticks his tongue out at someone? Not that I want to see puppy-kicking, but you get my drift. But that’s Dickens, I suppose.
Nicholas (Charlie Hunnam, whom some of you – very few of you, judging by how quickly it was cancelled – might remember from Fox’s “Undeclared”) is a country boy tossed into the cruel world with his mother and sister when his father dies and leaves them penniless. The Axis of Evil plotting his doom are his miserly, heartless uncle (Christopher Plummer, making a splendid villain), the brutish headmaster of the… uh… Dickensian boarding school where Nicholas gets hired as a teacher (Jim Broadbent), and the headmaster’s pinched, sour wife (Juliet Stevenson). But of course, because he’s good and pure and handsome, and they're ugly and mean, the movie ends with not only Nicholas’s triumph over the Axis of Evil but their comeuppances as well. And we’re all happy and sing and dance in a sunny field. I'm not kidding.
Within the Manichaean confines of their characters, Plummer and Tom Courtenay (as his assistant), stand out. The theater troupe Nicholas falls in with, including Nathan Lane as its leader, Dame Edna Everage (aka Barry Humphries) as his wife, and Alan Cumming as a self-besotted actor, provides lively comic relief. The rest of the actors blandly, though competently, are good or evil. Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot) I found particularly annoying as the crippled Smike, saved by Nicholas and thereafter attached to him; he’s all whingingly cow-eyed, cowering, passive, and meek.
But the movie
is reasonably enjoyable if you get over the simplicity
of it. It’s decent, wholesome entertainment. (I know that's
normally a condemnation, coming from me, but really, I mostly enjoyed
it.)
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