The Crummles rescue Nicholas ( Charlie Hunnam) after his escape from the Squeers school, turn him into an actor, and even find talent in the hapless Smike. Crummles ( Nathan Lane and Barry Humphries) and the brothers Cheeryble ( Timothy Spall and Gerald Horan). To balance the scales are two of the happiest comic couples Dickens ever created: the touring theatricals Vincent and Mrs. Their most pathetic target, Smike ( Jamie Bell, who played the title role in " Billy Elliot"), is seen as less of a caricature and more of a real victim. The movie gives full screen time to Wackford Squeers ( Jim Broadbent, looking curiously Churchillian) and his wife ( Juliet Stevenson)-and hints that psychosexual pathology inspired their mistreatment of students. McGrath has done some serious pruning, but the result does not seem too diluted there is room for expansive consideration of such essential characters as Nicholas' vindictive uncle Ralph ( Christopher Plummer), secretly undermined by his dipsomaniac and disloyal servant Newman Noggs ( Tom Courtenay). The movie is jolly and exciting and brimming with life, and wonderfully well-acted. The new film version by Douglas McGrath, who made " Emma" (1996), is much more reasonable than the 1980 nine-hour stage version of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which I have on laserdisk and really mean to get to one of these days.
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