Butler's Cinema Scene

Dan Stevens as Charles Dickens

“THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS” My rating: C

104 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

When it is evoking the spirit of Dickens’ immortal A Christmas Carol, “The Man Who Invented Christmas” cannot help but worm its way  into a viewer’s heart and mucus centers.

Seriously, for any halfway literate English-speaking person even the mention of Scrooge and the Christmas ghosts sets off mental and emotional detonations. Not only is A Christmas Carol one of the most artful stories ever written, it is credited by historians with triggering Victorian England’s wholehearted embrace of the Yuletide season. (Before the book’s publication, apparently, Christmas was no big deal.)

Adapted from John Stanford’s nonfiction book by Susan Coyne and directed by Bharat Nalluri (a veteran of Brit TV), “The Man Who  Invented Christmas” purports to relate how Charles Dickens came to write the story. Basically it’s Masterpiece Lite.

We first meet the great author (Dan Stevens, minus the facial hair of the older, more familiar  Dickens) in 1842 when he is going through a rough patch.  His last three books have tanked, his household is going through expensive civic improvements, his kids are running amok and the Missus (Morfydd Clark) announces that there’s another on the way.

Then there’s the arrival of Dickens’ father John (Jonathan Pryce), an entertaining/exasperating  bon vivant perennially in debt and congenitally incapable of earning his own living.

Desperate to offer his publishers a new book, Dickens proposes a Christmas story.  The editors are dubious, but Dickens says if necessary he’ll self-finance the volume. All he needs now are characters and a story.

Dan Stevens, Christopher Plummer

He finds them by studying the people around him. His generous and supportive friend John Forster (Justin Edwards) becomes the model for the celebratory Ghost of Christmas Present.  A cranky old man (Christopher Plummer) he spots in a graveyard transmutes into Ebenezer Scrooge. The shy Irish maid to whom Dickens reads his story-in-progress will inspired the Ghost of Christmas Past. His sister, brother-in-law and their sickly child ssume the roles of the Cratchitts.

In Dickens’ imagination these characters are so real that they hang around his study and follow him on his perambulations around London. Plummer’s Scrooge is particularly active, commenting caustically on what he sees as the author’s hopelessly humane and liberal outlook.

Along the way we get flashbacks to Dickens’ unhappy childhood. With his father carted off to debtor’s prison, young Charles is condemned to work in a filthy blacking factory, pasting labels on cans of shoe polish.

Ultimately, of course, A Christmas Carol is published just in time to become a runaway best seller and save the Dickens family fortune. God bless us, everyone.

The resulting film blends historic insight with dramatic silliness. Stevens, a pleasant enough screen presence, is watchable but seems uncomfortable with the darker corners of Dickens’ character (in latter years those darker corners would become more evident).

Plummer’s Scrooge, on the other hand, is so good that you hope the 88-year-old actor gets a crack at starring in a full-fledged “Christmas Carol” while there’s still time.

The supporting cast — made up of familiar faces like Simon Callow, Miriam Gargoyles, Bill Paterson and Donald Sumpter — are acceptable without anyone really standing out.  Production values are solid if unspectacular.

|Robert W. Butler