'The Personal History Of David Copperfield' Clip: Let's Go Fly A Kite

The coronavirus pandemic has thrown a mountain-sized wrench into everyone's year, revealing huge systemic problems and causing comparably insignificant annoyances along the way. Falling squarely in that latter category: several movies we really want to see still haven't been released in the United States yet.

Armando Iannucci's The Personal History of David Copperfield debuted at last year's Toronto International Film Festival and received spectacular reviews (including from /Film's Chris Evangelista), and as it inches toward a release, Searchlight Pictures has unveiled a new clip of the movie, showing Dev Patel and Hugh Laurie flying a kite. Sound pleasant? It is!

Iannucci, the usually acerbic storyteller behind things like Veep, In the Loop, The Thick of It, and The Death of Stalin, seems to be operating in a different mode this time around – one free of his typical cynicism and razor sharp edge. He wrote this script with Succession's Simon Blackwell, and took a color-blind casting approach by putting Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) in the lead role – a decision which apparently pays off wonderfully by revealing a side to the actor we haven't seen. He's joined on screen by Laurie, Peter Capaldi, Morfydd Clark, Daisy May Cooper, Rosalind Eleazar, Tilda Swinton, Ben Whishaw, Benedict Wong, Gwendoline Christie, and Paul Whitehouse.

Our review calls this movie "an utter joy to watch," and concludes like this: "The Personal History of David Copperfield is so warm, so inviting, so pure, that it will make your heart sing. We don't deserve a movie as overwhelmingly charming as this, but how lucky we are to have it."

Here's the movie's official synopsis:

THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD re-imagines Charles Dickens' classic ode to grit and perseverance through the comedic lens of its award-winning filmmakers— giving the Dickensian tale new life for a cosmopolitan age with a diverse ensemble cast of stage and screen actors from across the world. Emmy® winners and Oscar® nominees Armando Iannucci (IN THE LOOP, THE DEATH OF STALIN, HBO'S Veep) and Simon Blackwell (IN THE LOOP, HBO's Succession) lend their wry, yet heart-filled storytelling style to revisiting Dickens' iconic hero on his quirky journey from impoverished orphan to burgeoning writer in Victorian England.

The Personal History of David Copperfield was already released in the United Kingdom and evidently still aims to arrive in theaters in the United States on August 28, 2020.