Kind of false advertising...
I just got home from seeing this movie.
While it's good in a sort of glossy Hallmark-movie kinda way, and Dan Stevens is hot as Charles Dickens, as well as Christopher Plummer as Scrooge, in a lot of ways it was just...weird.
For one thing, it doesn't really have all that much to do with Christmas. The holiday is mentioned a couple of times. At the time of the book's writing, 1842, Christmas was considered mainly a religious holiday celebrated in church and that was about it. Really pretty minor-key.
What I thought this movie was going to be about, was how Dickens' book actually DID 'invent' Christmas. 'A Christmas Carol' is where we get a lot of our very "Victorian" notions of how Christmas ought to be: the Christmas tree, caroling, decorating, a big Christmas dinner, giving presents and charity giving. All of those things happened before the book came out, of course, but mostly in England and mostly on the down-low. Nobody made a big deal of it - until 'A Christmas Carol'.
Weirdly, the movie only mentions that the book changed how we do Christmas as a post-movie end-title card. We don't see any of it. What we see instead is Dan Stevens' Dickens portrayed as a somewhat harried young writer suffering from writer's block and a crappy relationship with his perpetually broke and begging father. He also flashes back to his lousy childhood spent as a child laborer in a bottle-blacking factory after his dad was thrown into debtor's prison.
The movie basically shows us how Dickens wrote 'A Christmas Carol' by talking out loud to his characters, yelling at his father, and enacting long monologues. He gets very hung up on how to end the book - he can't get to the idea that Scrooge is redeemed, but knows that ending the book with Scrooge and Tiny Tim dying is too much of a downer. We see the scene where he gets the idea for Scrooge's redemption - I think - but it isn't really clear. One second he's struggling, the next he has the idea for the ending and off he goes.
The movie was OK. Because it has that family-friendly gloss, we don't get to see too much of the actual hell that Dickens famously crusaded against: the debtor's prison, the filth and poverty of London, even the bottle-blacking factory is way too clean, the laboring children straight out of "Oliver!". I know Dicken's back-story, and it was hellish. Showing it more honestly would have given us a great contrast to the beauty and hope of his most famous book.
And of course, we don't see even a glimpse of Dickens' really big problems: his bouts of depression, the fact that he was in love with his wife's sister. I didn't really expect that we would, after all, it's a Christmas movie, not "The Lost Weekend." But still, the lack of real grit gives the whole thing kind of a fake, hokey sheen, the kind of nod-and-wink you get from those Hallmark Christmas movies where you know that you'll never see anything really bad or shocking. Kind of a shame, because the gloss means we never get any real depth, and depth would have made the movie more memorable.
Still, the costumes and settings are nice, the production values are first-rate and damn, Dan Stevens is hot. I'd give it 6.5 stars out of 10. God bless us, every...something...
Fun Fact: in once scene Dickens and his friend go to see Dickens' book publishers. The jowly fellow sitting down in that scene, with the fluffy white whiskers, is Ian McNiece. He was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company when they put on "The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby" in 1980. The play was based on the book written by...Charles Dickens.