Of the five big-screen treatments given to Charles Dickens' penultimate novel (including a silent-era one and Alfonso Cuaron's ill-judged MTV-style 1998 update) only David Lean's 1946 version, rightly regarded as a classic, deserves to be remembered.
The newest attempt, plainly a work of good, even great, intentions, won't change that. Newell tips his hat to the master often enough (his opening shot is identical to Lean's) but the adaptation struggles to breathe.
Re-reading the novel a few years ago, I was struck by how extraordinarily funny it often is, but there's no lightness of touch here. The script by David Nicholls, who so brilliantly adapted Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father?, is at its best when it reproduces Dickens faithfully - in Mr Hubble's condemnation of children as "naterally wicious", for example, or the rants by Mrs Joe (Hawkins is gone too soon).
But there's a head-spinning period of expository dialogue about three-quarters of the way through, complete with cheesy flashbacks, in which the entire interlocking series of conspiracies is explained, and it quite drains the life from proceedings.
Dickens' novel is "about" so much - class, money, power, betrayal, love, jealousy, loyalty, family - that it's a big ask to shrink it to two hours of screen time. You need to decide which thread you're going to follow and this version tries to have it all. It's an approach better suited to a multi-part TV version; here, it leads to logjams and sudden rushes.
