A Dickens Christmas with charm and all the trimmings
WITH Dan Stevens as Charles Dickens, Jonathan Pryce as his feckless father, Christopher Plummer as Scrooge — and Miriam Margolyes, Simon Callow, Miles Jupp and Bill Paterson in supporting roles — expectations might verge on great for this film about the writing of A Christmas Carol.
Alas, those great expectations are mostly dashed. The Man Who Invented Christmas is a bit of a turkey, albeit with all the trimmings.
It looks good in a cliched, Dickensian sort of way, with more sooty urchins and mutton-chop whiskers than you can shake a hansom cab at. And the performances are solid. Plummer in particular makes an excellent Scrooge whose narrative arc, when you think about it, is exactly that of Captain Von Trapp.
But director Bharat Nalluri doesn’t seem sure whether he is giving us a comedy, a children’s film, a history lesson or a tinselly piece of nonsense, and his uncertainty shows.
Moreover, it is shared by writer Susan Coyne, who feeds us silly anachronisms one minute — ‘they’re mad as snakes, the Yanks’ — and tugs heartstrings the next with flashbacks to poor little Charlie toiling in a blacking factory.
At the start of the film, it is 1843 and Dickens is a huge literary star, the Ed Sheeran of his day. But he is in desperate need of a hit after a couple of flops, not least to fund his lavish lifestyle. To make matters worse, down at the Garrick Club his rival Thackeray (Jupp) keeps winding him up about his poor run of form.
Eventually, Dickens shrugs off a debilitating case of writer’s block and gets to work with his faithful quill on a whimsical story about charity and heartlessness at Christmas, with his imagined characters coming to life before his very eyes.
Stevens rather mugs his way through all this, but the picture is not without its charms and I don’t think we need the Ghost of Christmas Future to tell us that it will probably be a staple of festive telly for the rest of eternity.