The Man Who Invented Christmas Review

With Thanksgiving over, it's officially time to put our focus on Christmas. What better way to start the season off than by reviewing this appropriately timed biopic of Charles Dickens as he wrote everyone's favorite Christmas novella, "A Christmas Carol"? Even though I'm a Grinch during most of November as I get frustrated with people seemingly skipping over Thanksgiving by celebrating Christmas right when Halloween ends (or before in some cases), I really do enjoy the Christmas season, so long as people don't put too much of their focus on the commercialism aspect of the holiday. In fact, I considered going on a run of Christmas-themed movie reviews during December like I did with Halloween movies in October. But I'm probably not going to get around to that this year with how busy things usually are in December. What I might do instead is give you one special review of a Christmas movie on or close to Christmas. While I had this idea in mind before I saw this movie, I mention it here because that movie would indeed be my favorite version of "A Christmas Carol," which I will leave a mystery for now. There's a lot of them. And a lot of good versions, too. Thus made it all the more fun to go watch the movie about how this story came to be.

While I'm very familiar with "A Christmas Carol," I'm less familiar with Charles Dickens himself and the events that led up to the publishing of this classic novella. Thus I found this movie fascinatingly educational. Here we start with Charles Dickens celebrating the enormous success of his novel "Oliver Twist" in 1839, which was quite overwhelming for him in certain instances. Fast forward a few years until October 1843 where Dickens has since experienced, according to the movie, three straight flops, putting him into a bit of a predicament moving forward with his career. Looking at Dickens' bibliography, I'm guessing that these flops were "Nicholas Nickelby," "The Old Curiosity Shop" and "Barnaby Rudge." I don't know enough about Dickens to know if flop is the right word for these books, but I can say with confidence that "Oliver Twist" and "A Christmas Carol" are certainly more well-known. Thus we have a movie in "The Man Who Invented Christmas" that is not only an insight into what inspired "A Christmas Carol" and what Dickens went through in trying to get that story finalized, but we also have a movie that dives into the mindset and life of a writer while they are experiencing the valleys in between their peaks of success.

That latter aspect is something that I think can be very relatable to many people. It can be very frustrating putting your heart and soul into a certain project only to see the Grinches that write reviews to take a few looks at it and then pan it as garbage. It's very disheartening. Thus you can empathize with Dickens' desire to ignore what the critics have to say and hope that the casual readers will appreciate his work more. But then they start to ignore him, too, in the form of not buying his books and suddenly Dickens is left in a predicament that he is running out of money and needs to come up with something because he has a wife and kids he needs to support with another child on the way. Sometimes we forgot about the behind-the-scenes drama that can happen in the life of a writer when things aren't going their way. Now I'm not as big into reading books as others, so instead I like to apply this to filmmaking and use stories like this to help remind me that it takes a lot of time and effort to write, direct and make a film. Yes, I will be honest about my opinions as I write these reviews, but I also do my best to respect the process and remember everything that went into making these movies. So I appreciated this movie for reminding me to be a bit sensitive when giving my opinions.

That of course isn't the main focus of this movie. But I found it to be an interesting side note. Whether or not you are the one writing the reviews or simply consuming the material, whether it be books, movies, TV shows or whatever, it's good to remember that this is someone's life work over the last however many months or even years. With that perspective in mind, I think it becomes easier to at least do a better job of respecting the material. The main focus of this movie, though, is the other aspect of writing. Bringing a story to life. Which can be equally as challenging, if not more so. Because we have this thing called writer's block that every writer goes through. I know I do all the time when I'm writing these movie reviews. It took me a bit of time to figure out exactly how to approach this one and I got stuck a few times along the way. Sometimes these reviews come easy for me. Other times they're really difficult. Even if you're not in the writing field, we've all been to school on some level and have been asked by a professor to write a paper. Sometimes we get those papers churned out really quick. Other times we get stuck. So yeah, I think we all know what Charles Dickens is going through to some degree, which made this a fun watch, at least for me.

Speaking of writing, the challenge with this movie is how are they going to manage to make a movie about someone writing a book interesting? It's especially tricky considering we all know how this story turns out. Because, spoiler alert (but not really), Dickens successfully writes "A Christmas Carol" and everyone loved it. There can't be too many twists and surprises with this movie, so they had to come up with a way to make the journey interesting. I personally think they did a great job at that as the approach here was to make the characters themselves show up once Dickens nailed them down in his head. As the saying goes, once you have everything in place, the story writes itself, right? I found it to be a blast to watch Dickens interact with all of these characters as it almost took him by surprise when characters would show up and argue with him about how things were going to turn out and what the right thing to do was. Specifically the interactions between Dickens and Scrooge were priceless as the two would banter back and forth quite a bit during this process. This was helped by great chemistry between Dan Stevens as Dickens and Christopher Plummer as Scrooge, the latter now has to be included in the conversation of one of the best portrayals of Scrooge.

This here leads us to the themes of the movie. The biggest block that Dickens goes through in writing this story is how is he going to properly finish this story that does justice to the characters while portraying the appropriate messages that he is trying to get across. The biggest obstacle in this being the character of Scrooge. Can a man really change overnight when he's spent his whole life being bitter and angry towards the world? This put Dickens through quite the turmoil which causes the movie to parallel "A Christmas Carol" in his themes. Dickens is a good man, but he gets so invested in this story and so troubled with how he's going to finish it that he kinda becomes a Scrooge himself as he starts pushing away the people he cares about, not fully realizing what he's doing. Thus we get the themes from "A Christmas Carol" centered on what Christmas is, or should be, all about. What makes "A Christmas Carol" so moving is seeing the transformation of Scrooge through the night as he examines what happened to him in the past, what's going on around him in the present and what could happen if he doesn't change. We see similar transformations from Dickens in this movie as he figures out what this story is going to be.

I don't know what Bleecker Street's plans are with this movie's expansion throughout the holiday. It only opened in around 600 theaters and didn't have the best per theater average during that opening weekend. So this might be the type of movie where you will have to go on a bit of a hunt to figure out exactly where it's playing. But if you're a fan of any version of "A Christmas Carol," I would highly suggest you make that hunt because this is a solid companion piece to "A Christmas Carol" as it provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes look into what went into the writing of this story. We get a good look into what life can be like for a writer in general, which can help us more appreciate the final results of their work. But it was also fun seeing this specific story come to life as Dickens is interacting with his characters as they show up and help him in writing his story, which felt very metaphorical for what was going on in Dickens' head and the movie does a great job of successfully pulling at your heartstrings in a way that a holiday movie should do as we see this story go from an idea in Dickens' head to a published novella that really did help revolutionize how people looked at Christmas back in the day and continues to do so today. I'm going to award the movie an 8/10.