Dickens fans will warm to this bookish fantasy
In 1843, Charles Dickens was having a very bad year. Three of his books – Martin Chuzzlewit, Barnaby Rudge and American Notes – were consecutive flops, and for the first time his publishers, Chapman & Hall, were getting cagey. He’d begun expensive renovations on his house at an extremely unfortunate time, with the wolf practically at the door, even before his wife, Catherine, announced she was pregnant with their fifth child.
And then, in a burst of feverish inspiration, he wrote A Christmas Carol, one of his most beloved and instantly successful pieces of fiction, and one that had a serious role to play in how western cultures would look at the festive season forever after.
This is all the Wikipedian context propping up The Man Who Invented Christmas, but such a précis doesn’t really capture the game it’s playing. Take Shakespeare in Love, replace it with Dickens in the Doldrums, and you get a little closer.
At its best, the game is deft, droll and moderately ingenious: we’re not talking Tom Stoppard levels of erudition, but some kind of A-level equivalent. The characters of the novella, above all Scrooge (Christopher Plummer), appear to Dickens in his throes of invention, and at one point sit around impatiently in his study while he grapples with writer’s block.
These flights of fancy are hard to quibble with in a glad-tidings sort of spirit. The low-budget production – somewhat Cratchitty in itself – is frequently more resourceful than you’d think: the corpse-like make-up on Sumpter, manifesting in chains and moaning at the study door, is fantastic.
The wittiest scenes, though, are the ones of literary one-upmanship in broad daylight. Every appearance from the oily, gloating Thackeray (Miles Jupp) at the Garrick Club is a delight. The role of Dickens’s father, John, twice imprisoned for debt and the model for Mr Micawber in David Copperfield, falls to Jonathan Pryce, in a sentimental turn that’s intentionally the antithesis to Plummer’s expert humbugging. Having these two veterans compete to occupy Charles’s harassed head space is a neat idea.
Meanwhile, the enjoyment value of watching Dan Stevens flap around as Dickens hinges purely on how you get on with Stevens. I just can’t seem to manage, except when he wholly reinvented himself as a blank-faced psychopath in The Guest. Here he’s back to all his old coy, Downton-esque twitching and polite smiling and I just cannot. True, Downton fans adored him – but then again, they adored Downton. Let’s just say, results of this particular test may vary, in a perkily unpretentious film that trundles along fine as bookish entertainment.