The Man Who Invented Christmas tells the tale of how Dickens created a holiday classic, making for a 'cute' one of its own

By all rights, The Man Who Invented Christmas should be a humbug. Instead, it’s a humdinger.

The movie is based on Les Standiford’s long-winded historical non-fiction from 2008, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits.
It tells how a harried Charles John Huffam Dickens (Dan Stevens of Downton Abbey and Beauty and the Beast), facing mounting debts and poor reviews for his latest books, dashed off a 28,000-word novella that became an instant classic. Not only that, it changed our vocabulary, from “Dead as a door-nail” to “God bless us, every one!” And when was the last time you met someone named Ebenezer?

There have been almost 100 cinematic adaptations of the novel since the 1901 short Scrooge; or Marley’s Ghost. It’s been performed by everyone from the Flintstones to the Jetsons, and including the Muppets, Blackadder, Bill Murray, Dr. Who and even Matthew McConaughey, in Ghosts of Girlfriends
A Christmas Carol being the popular story it is, we’re invited to play spot-the-reference as Dickens gradually cobbles together ideas that will inform his new book – a humbug here, a Marley there, a reference to picking a man’s pockets every 25th of December, an Irish folk tale about ghosts, courtesy of his maid; hey, it’s not plagiarism if you just steal a little bit from absolutely everybody!

But he’s mostly aided by Scrooge himself, played by the towering thespian Christopher Plummer in an even more towering hat. Once conjured by the imagination of the author, he skulks around Dickens at his writing desk, offering grouchy advice and complaining that his character doesn’t have enough to say. And so we have a story about a story, with Plummer’s Scrooge magnificent as the ghost in the ghost in the machine.

The screenplay by Susan Coyne adds some additional narrative wrinkles. Justin Edwards plays Dickens’s friend and future biographer John Forster as a kind of affable sidekick: “You’re the one who convinced me to kill off Little Nell,” Dickens remarks at one point. And there’s a ticking-clock device in which, if Dickens can’t get the pages to the printer by a certain date, he’ll miss the all-important pre-Yuletide publication. It’s all so cute that if the film weren’t so good-hearted it would be insufferable.

As it is, the critic is reduced to the most minor nit-picking. To wit, Dickens’ use of the phrase “There’s gold in them thar hills” five years before the gold rush that gave rise to the phrase. And a newspaper headline that reads: “Interesting murder in London”? No way would that have passed muster on Fleet Street in the 1840s. Such trifles aside, The Man Who Invented Christmas is a lovely holiday bauble, sure to delight.