How a 19th-century story informs the modern holiday spirit.
At 31 years old, Charles Dickens was already a novelist of international renown. He’d also hit upon a career slump—a string of three commercial flops—and needed to deliver a hit to escape mounting financial pressures.
In the winter of 1843, the author struck on the idea of a Christmas ghost story that would be released in time for the holiday. However, his late-fall moment of inspiration left him almost no time to get his book to press—only half a dozen weeks for the story to take shape, for an illustrator to supply drawings, and for the printers to supply them to stores.
The Man Who Invented Christmas is the story of those six weeks of breakneck creativity during which Dickens wrote perhaps his most beloved work. The movie is a thoroughly pleasant, sometimes funny, and occasionally reflective story with a PG-rating and storybook aesthetic that recommend it as the go-to family film of this holiday season.
Dan Stevens—once a star of Downton Abbey—delivers an eccentric, anxious, animated young Dickens to the screen. He gets incredible mileage out of his expressive blue eyes and conveys Dickens’s writerly flights of inspiration with a near crackling energy. Better still, Stevens’s Dickens finds an equally entertaining foil in Christopher Plummer’s Scrooge. Something peculiarly pleasing occurs the first time Plummer appears, equipped with top hat and cane, shuffling through a London cemetery. I felt as though I’d unwittingly been waiting for a long time to see him in this role, so much so that his first “Bah. Humbug!” evoked a satisfied sigh of “at last!”
Much of the fun in this film hinges on similar moments of recognition as the story weaves familiar ...
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