South Florida author Les Standiford’s lively and revelatory book The Man Who Invented Christmas, about Charles Dickens’ writing and self-funded publication of A Christmas Carol, backs up its provocative title. Sure, Christmas had been celebrated since before the first centennial. But A Christmas Carol, Standiford asserted—a novella penned in six weeks, its author crippled by debt, writer’s block and a string of commercial flops—established the popular concept of Christmas as the most charitable of holidays, where support of the less fortunate became as commonplace as turkey and tinsel.
This theme comes across in filmmaker Bharat Nalluri’s movie adaptation as well, but its facile narrative shortcuts leave much to be desired. Nalluri’s cutesy direction and Susan Coyne’s contrived screenplay can’t match Standiford’s engrossing prose, to say nothing of Dickens’ own grace and beauty.
On the contrary, Nalluri reduces Dickens’ capacity for invention. In this movie’s telling, he’s more of an observational aggregator of ideas. Played by the ubiquitous British actor Dan Stevens—in his fifth film of 2017, including as one of the title characters in “Beauty & the Beast”—Dickens gleans the skeleton of A Christmas Carol from chance encounters. He meets a gangly, half-in-the-grave waiter named Marley. He strikes up a conversation with a Scrooge-y grump outside a theater who disparages the poor and trots out the “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” meme. He overhears a spectral codger in a cemetery mutter the euphemism, “humbug!” An insert shot of chains protecting the lock of his moneylender’s safe presumably gifts him with the idea of Marley’s shackles, and so on, until every jigsaw of the story’s puzzle locks into place.
Well, I say humbug to all that. Yes, it’s always a challenge to depict a writer’s cerebral process onscreen without succumbing to inertia and cliché. (Before Dickens stumbles onto his story, “The Man Who Invented Christmas” gives this a go for a while, too. We get a close-up of his pen, hovering over a blank sheet of parchment and dripping a spot of ink, the 1843 equivalent of today’s novelist staring torturously at a blinking cursor.) But this kind of lazy shorthand is never the solution.
The movie fares better when it gives in to more playful flights of fancy. Dickens’ evolving conception of Ebenezer Scrooge appears in his study as a flesh-and-blood co-creator played with sneering deliciousness by Christopher Plummer. Once they begin conversing, the portal opens wider, soon allowing Jacob Marley (Donald Sumpter), the Ghost of Christmas Past and so on.
For a while, this is a neat way to depict the writer’s process: as one of subconscious conjuring, of trancelike hallucinations seen only in the mind’s eye of the wordsmith. Woody Allen’s “Deconstructing Harry” deployed this device, albeit with more caustic results.
This conceit runs out of gas, though, when it becomes a front for yet another cinematic repackaging of A Christmas Carol, with Dickens doubling as a real-life Scrooge who must learn to mend the severed ties with his freeloading father (Jonathan Pryce), refocus his energies on his pregnant wife (an underused Morfydd Clark), and thus learn the spirit of the season. This leads the writer on a hackneyed journey through nightmares, memories and pop psychology, culminating in a dull and dutiful exorcism of personal demons.
There is sweetness here, too, and a warming of cockles that befits a family-friendly holiday movie. But it’s unearned sentiment, which is the most maudlin kind—and which Dickens himself carefully avoided. But if this film increases the book sales for Standiford’s enlightening tome, then God bless us, every one!
“The Man Who Invented Christmas” is now playing at Regal Shadowood in Boca Raton, Movies of Lake Worth, Regal Royal Palm 18 and other area theaters.
