Dickens at his finest

Telly serials have nearly killed off the one-off, bigscreen adaptation of English classics. Dickens - like Jane Austen, George Eliot, Trollope or Thackeray - comes along in weekly dollops of " heritage" cinema, "sexed up" (to use the phrase that even Parliament now applies so vulgarly to pro-Iraqi War memoranda), and putting more emphasis on Mr Darcy's tight crotch than Miss Austen's dexterous pen. Which is why Douglas McGrath's version of Nicholas Nickleby arrives like a palate cleanser.

It is very good: faithful, confident, shapely, hugely entertaining and with a cast that is a National Portrait Gallery of contemporary actors. McGrath (who adapted Austen's Emma so finely) writes and directs with love for and trust in the book.

He has relocated Nicholas Nickelby in the 1850s, rather than the 1830s, and puts the characters into not just period dress, but costume that tells us about the social conditions of England as well as the churning fortunes of the characters.

He makes a virtue of Dickens's failure to provide heroes and heroines as dynamically limned as the "grotesques".

Charlie Hunnam (from Queer As Folk) is kept throughout in severe funereal black, which turns his pretty-boy blond looks into a heroic determination to rescue his sister Kate (Romola Garai), mother (Stella Gonet) and the orphaned drudge Smike (Jamie Bell) from the clutches of his Uncle Ralph (Christopher Plummer).

Plummer is the primus inter pares in this monsters' cabinet-Cruel to the core, but silver-tongued (and hair that looks as if it is washed in silver dip), this City financier refers to his evil intentions with the frankness of Lucifer.

"Friends of mine? Nonsense! I have no friends," he asserts proudly to his embittered clerk, Newman Noggs (Tom Courtenay, resentfully parroting his master's voice). Production designer Eve Stewart has created a marvellous study for Ralph, where the dainty skeletons of birds, ossified eggs and amputated parts suggest an exquisite mausoleum.

Besides the early temples of corrupt capitalism, Dickens's own indictment of the cruelty

of his age is brilliantly represented in the workhouse institution of Dotheboys Hall.

Like the characters in it, every aspect of this Yorkshire boarding-school hell looks realistic enough to exist and not just feature as a Gothic nightmare.

JIM Broadbent's Squeers, with one eye resembling a pickled walnut, presides like a Cyclops; the uxorious embrace between him and his hag of a wife (Juliet Stevenson) adds a repellent dimension of smoochiness to Dickens's devil-couple.

Humour is as well depicted as horror. Nathan Lane plays the flamboyant theatrical manager Vincent Crummles, and you can see the director's winning inventiveness in the casting of Barry Humphries as Mrs C and Alan Cumming as a thespian who wants to find room in Romeo and Juliet for the Highland Fling.

The film is a treat wherever you look. Crummles is seen lounging in what looks like enviable luxury, then a ripple of wind reveals the marble and mahogany to be just a painted backcloth. A Cheeryble Brother turns round and lo! it is Timothy Spall. And when you see his twin sibling (Gerald Horan) beside him, you relish even more the Tweddledum and Tweedledee effect planted on screen by their facing partners' desks.

Edward Fox's Sir Mulberry Hawk, Ralph's financial crony, has the lecherous bray of the blue-blood seducer. Instead of making us endure Nicholas's sweet-tea romancing of his sweetheart Madeline (Anne Hathaway), the film concentrates on his touching concern, and final battle for the life of the abused and mysterious Smike.

Dickens was a soft-centre meringue when it came to the romance; putting the emphasis of interest on an exploited boy who has fallen through the cracks of charity is a prudent substitute.

Dick Pope's wide-screen photography shows how he can broaden his social scope from his frequent Mike Leigh collaborations on small communities. The film carries its length - 136 minutes - lightly. Yet its dramatic weight is powerful.