Dan Stevens plays Charles Dickens in this tin-eared,saccharine, entirely terrible comedian fantasy about the writing of A Christmas Carol This entirely terrible film feels about as Christmassy as watching England depart out of the World Cup at the group stage. Dan Stevens – usually a likable and ingenuous screen presence – is horribly miscast and misdirected in the role of Charles Dickens in a kind of wacky and saccharine muttonchop-whisker-gawd-bless-yer fantasy-comedy of what it was like when he wrote A Christmas Carol and thus supposedly “invented Christmas”. Dickens keeps bumping into people called “Marley” and “Copperfield” and nodding significantly to himself, and occasionally writing in his notebook. The film suggests he wrote this Christmas tale out of the blue (in fact he had already written three other Christmas stories). We see him having lunch with his friend John Forster (Justin Edwards),getting exasperated with his Micawberesque dad John (Jonathan Pryce) and having hallucinatory conversations with all the people he’s dreaming up: including, of course, or Scrooge,played by Christopher Plummer. Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk