‘No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of another…’
There is literally nothing that epitomises Christmas like Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I have watched five different versions of that classic tale for the 12 Days of Christmas Films so you may ask what could yet another new version possibly bring to the table. Certainly not an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, or a fragment of underdone potato…
Coming off the back of three flops and charging headlong into debt and misery, Charles Dickens (Dan Stevens) must find a hit from somewhere. With Christmas fast approaching and a family to provide for, Charlie has an idea. What if he were to write a book about Christmas? That is why he is a genius folks, and that’s also probably why the idea of a Christmas film even exists. Legend.
The thing that makes The Man Who Invented Christmas fresh is that it combines Dickens’ journey with that of everyone’s favourite tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Ebenezer Scrooge. This means we still get all the ghosts, even the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come rocks up. Love that guy. The life and soul of any party.
The first 40 minutes of this Netflix Christmas treat are fantastic. Funny, well acted and intelligent. Eventually the film collapses a little under the weight of its ambition and while there is a hell of a lot of artistic licence here, it’s rare for a modern day Christmas film to have some good quality production values while simultaneously being fresh and exciting.
Elsewhere, Christopher Plummer makes for a particularly nasty Scrooge, Jonathan Pryce casts off the shackles of playing that old turd the High Sparrow in Game of Thrones to bring a good-natured warmth to the role of Charlie’s troubled father John Dickens and Justin Edwards shares an easy chemistry with his co-stars as Dickens’ friend and confidante John Forster.
All in all, The Man Who Invented Christmas is a solid entry in the genre-within-a-genre that is films inspired by A Christmas Carol. Keep your humbugs in your pocket Scrooge, you won’t need them here.