Christmas story that keeps on giving
THE Man Who Invented Christmas can’t help but warm the cockles of a moviegoer’s heart.
Directed by Indian-born Bharat Nalluri, this highly theatrical Christmas Carol has a clever twist: it reveals the whirlwind writing process that Charles Dickens went through, over the course of six weeks, to produce his 1843 novella in time for the holiday. Inspired by historian Les Standiford’s 2008 book The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits, screenwriter Susan Coyne depicts the popular, 31-year-old author as mired in a creative crisis.
As the story gets under way, the father-of-four learns from his indulgent wife (Morfydd Clark) that a fifth little Dickens is on the way, even as he is growing deeper in debt from an ongoing home renovation project.
Desperate for an ember of an idea, he listens as his Irish housemaid (Anna Murphy) relates a folk tale about the awakening of spirits at Christmas – complete with eerie, keening sounds. That leads to the idea of a visitation by three ghosts representing Christmas past, present and future.
Dickens begins to cherry-pick characters based on chance encounters with real Londoners.
God has blessed us, every one, with Dan Stevens, who inhabits the character of Dickens beautifully. Stevens’s beguiling blue eyes can signal, in a blink, a cavalcade of emotions.
As the man who would inspire the character of Scrooge – first spied at night in a cemetery attending a threadbare burial for his business partner, while uttering, “Bah, humbug!” – Christopher Plummer is well chosen. Jonathan Pryce is quite good in the role of a wastrel whose legal troubles forced a young Charlie to toil in a workhouse.
The film’s title perhaps oversells what Dickens achieved with A Christmas Carol.
He is shown as an early adopter of the German tradition of decorating indoor trees. Nevertheless, during the Industrial Age, a time of great wealth and dreadful poverty, the writer chose to not just deck the halls, but also to extol acts of charity, the spreading of good cheer, the forgiving of trespasses and, most of all, the possibility of redemption.
All are traits that remain, even in 2017, imminently re-giftable.