The Man Who Invented Christmas * (2017, Dan Stevens, Christopher Plummer, Jonathan Pryce) – Movie Review

I’ve just opened my Time Out and I’m in shock. They gave The Man Who Invented Christmas FOUR STARS! So I’ve got to say it: ‘Bah, humbug!’

The Man Who Invented Christmas is a well meaning but clumsy and amateurish film. Just because you stick Christmas in the title, or do a sequel set around Christmas (like Daddy’s Home 2), it doesn’t mean that people’s critical faculties have to go to sleep like you do after too much pud and wine at Christmas dinner. I know at Christmas you can sell anything, but there are limits to being given socks again for Christmas.

As it’s coming on near Christmas, I’ll just say that Dan Stevens, Christopher Plummer and Jonathan Pryce are thoroughly professional and competent if hammy as Charles Dickens, his creation Ebenezer Scrooge and his ne’er-do-well estranged dad John Dickens. All three actors (and the others, Simon Callow, Miriam Margolyes, Ian McNeice, Morfydd Clark, Donald Sumpter, Bill Paterson, Miles Jupp, Annette Badland) feel like they are warming up for the Christmas panto.

But I’m not going to blame the actors. They are trying to put their backs into it. It is director Bharat Nalluri, screen-writer Susan Coyne (her screenplay is based on Les Standiford’s book) and the stagey, undernourished production that are to to blame here.

The story about whether the cash-strapped Dickens can meet his publisher’s looming deadline hardly merits a spark of interest. In any case, we know he does. There’s a book called A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, so not much tension there then. The sub-plot about whether Charles will chuck his reprobate dad out into the streets at Christmas doesn’t merit much interest or spark much tension either. It’s pretty obvious how it’s all going to end. ‘God bless us every one!’

The film drifts as much as snow in the depths of winter. It may all be fact based but I didn’t believe a word of it. It does feel like soppy fairy tale fiction. Dickens isn’t The Man Who Invented Christmas. No actually, he is not.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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