One of Hollywood's better book conversions

Just watched this for the first time, and I must say I was quite surprised - and impressed. Given Hollywood's track record of butchering books, they did a good job porting this one to the screen.

Given the limitations of the media - the book is huge and to cover it all would require a trilogy of the magnitude of The Lord of the Rings - they kept to the original story and adapted it quite well. Obviously some elements had to be dropped to fit it all in, so I wasn't surprised to see some significant omissions. There's no sign of Kate's travails with the Mantalini millinery establishment, for one thing, or of the Mantalinis themselves. The reduction of the plot involving Smike (in the book a man called Snawley was posited as his father) was also well handled by conflating Snawley and Squeers, and the character conflation that has Sir Mulberry put forward as the husband-to-be for Madeline (in the book it was another usurer, Arthur Gride, with the intention of getting hold of Madeline's inheritance - an element here deployed as the subplot involving Ralph's wife) worked very well too.

I realise that in bringing a book to the screen there must of necessity be some compression of the story and characters; after all, in a movie the story must be told in much less time than it takes to read a book. Few could read this book in two days, let alone two hours. This movie does it especially well, keeping the essential points of the story true to the book while reducing extraneous characters and plotlines to keep it within a reasonable time frame.

Understanding this, it is not this compression that annoys me in most book-to-film conversions; what annoys me is when the producers and directors introduce elements that aren't in the book, often changing the meaning of the story and wasting screen time that could have been given to more that is in the book. Most of the time, Hollywood directors butcher a book by adding such elements or changing the setting (a common egregious example is moving a setting from Victorian England to 20th/21st century America) or message of the story (for example both hatchet-jobs done by Hollywood on H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.) Too often, a movie claiming to be based on a book shares little more with it than the title and the names of the main characters.

Nicholas Nickleby is a notable exception; while a fair amount has understandably been dropped or compressed, nothing that isn't in the book has been added, and the essential setting and morals of the story remain intact. I also appreciated the honest and non-judgmental portrayal of the social mores of the time, without any concessions to political correctness or anvilicious feminist gender-role bombing, a failing of too many modern depictions of medieval or Victorian stories, and refreshingly absent from this one.

As a Dickens fan who has read the book multiple times, I'm impressed. I will definitely watch this again.