THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS
Director Bharat Nalluri
Cert. PG 104 mins
We were all rooting for Dan Stevens, because of his Downton Abbey connections (Matthew Crawley). Sadly this move to the silver screen is not something I think he’ll be pleased with.
The film is about Charles Dickens. The premise is that Dickens’ publication of his Yuletide novel, A Christmas Carol, radically enhanced the way the festival is celebrated. The end notes inform us that charitable giving soared as a result.
Scrooge’s story
So how did the great masterpiece come to be written? The film suggests that Dickens was in financial difficulties, at odds with his tiresome father, and had his publishers breathing down his neck. It turns into a mixture of an unsatisfactory retelling of Scrooge’s story and a mishmash of pop-psychology put together, seemingly, by a committee at odds with itself! In other words, it’s a mess.
However, it does wrestle with the question of how a human being’s character can really be changed. Its solution finds Charles Dickens himself being conscience-stricken to realise that the sins of which he accuses others are very much part of his own heart and behaviour. Hence he writes the dramatic final scenes depicting Scrooge’s glorious ‘conversion’.
This was the one nugget I took away from the cinema. It reminded me that in preaching we need not only to describe the gospel but also aim to awaken people’s consciences.
