NO HUMBUG HERE
The Man Who Invented Christmas conjures up warm feelings of the season
By all rights, The Man Who Invented Christmas should be a humbug. Instead, it’s a humdinger.
The movie is based on Les Standiford’s long-winded historical non-fiction from 2008, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits. And before that on the medium-winded A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas, from 1843.
It tells how a harried Charles John Huffam Dickens (Dan Stevens of Downton Abbey and Beauty and the Beast), facing mounting debts and poor reviews for his latest books, dashed off a 28,000-word novella that became an instant classic. Not only that, it changed our vocabulary, ranging from “Dead as a doornail” to “God bless us, every one!” And when was the last time you met someone named Ebenezer?
There have been almost 100 cinematic
THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS ★★★★ 1/2 out of 5
Cast: Dan Stevens, Jonathan Pryce, Christopher Plummer
Director: Bharat Nalluri
Duration: 1 h 44 m
adaptations of the novel since the 1901 short Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost. It’s been performed by everyone from the Flintstones to the Jetsons, and including the Muppets, Blackadder, Bill Murray, Doctor Who and even Matthew McConaughey in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.
In director Bharat Nalluri’s version, however, it’s the writing rather than the tale itself that’s at the forefront. Dickens has just returned from a tour of the United States (and, though the film doesn’t mention it, Toronto, Kingston and Montreal) to less than glowing notices for Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit. He’s casting about for a new idea, something to help pay the bills incurred by his home redecorating, his growing family and his wastrel of a father (Jonathan Pryce), who shows up and won’t leave.
A Christmas Carol being the popular story it is, we’re invited to play spot-thereference as Dickens gradually cobbles together ideas that will inform his new book — a humbug here, a Marley there, a reference to picking a man’s pockets every 25th of December, an Irish folk tale about ghosts, courtesy of his maid. Hey, it’s not plagiarism if you just steal a little bit from absolutely everybody!
But he’s mostly aided by Scrooge himself, played by the towering thespian Christopher Plummer in an even more towering hat. Once conjured by the imagination of the author, he skulks around Dickens at his writing desk, offering grouchy advice and complaining that his character doesn’t have enough to say. And so we have a story about a story, with Plummer’s Scrooge magnificent as the ghost in the ghost in the machine. The screenplay by Susan Coyne adds some additional narrative wrinkles. Justin Edwards plays Dickens’ friend and future biographer John Forster as a kind of affable sidekick: “You’re the one who convinced me to kill off Little Nell,” Dickens remarks at one point. And there’s a ticking-clock device in which, if Dickens can’t get the pages to the printer by a certain date, he’ll miss the all-important preYuletide publication. It’s all so cute that if the film weren’t so good-hearted, it would be insufferable.
As it is, the critic is reduced to the most minor nitpicking. To wit, Dickens’ use of the phrase “There’s gold in them thar hills” five years before the gold rush that gave rise to the phrase. And a newspaper headline that reads: “Interesting murder in London”? No way would that have passed muster on Fleet Street in the 1840s. Such trifles aside, The Man Who Invented Christmas is a lovely holiday bauble, sure to delight.