The Man Who Invented Christmas(2017)

Storyline

• In 1843, celebrated British novelist Charles Dickens is at a low point in his career with three flops behind him and family expenses piling up at home. Determined to recover, Dickens decides to write a Christmas story and self-publish it in less than two months. As Dickens labors writing on such short notice, his estranged father and mother come to bunk with him. Still haunted by painful memories of his father ruining his childhood by his financial irresponsibility, Dickens develops a seemingly-unsolvable writer's block. Dickens must face his personal demons epitomized through his characters, especially in his imagined conversations with Ebenezer Scrooge. With a looming deadline, Dickens struggles for inspiration against his frustrations and his characters' opinions in a literary challenge creating a classic tale that would define the essential soul of modern Christmas. — Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com) Two years after the success of "Oliver Twist," Charles Dickens is suffering financial hardship from the failure of his last three books. Rejected by his publishers, he sets out to write a new book to restore his finances. Seeing inspiration around London, most notably a rich man's funeral that is largely unattended, he begins writing "A Christmas Carol," due in six weeks in order to be published by Christmas. As Charles begins to develop his story, he interacts with the characters he is writing about, most notably Ebenezer Scrooge. Helping Dickens is one of his servants, Tara, an Irish immigrant who is literate and able to provide advice. A fictional account of the creation of what has become a holiday classic. It's 1843, and Charles Dickens , who only less than a few years ago had enjoyed critical and public acclaim with Oliver Twist, is facing financial and legal troubles having had three subsequent failures in a row, with a seeming case of writer's block to boot. Gathering inspiration from things happening around him, he thinks he has the germ of an idea in seeing who looks to be a wealthy man with the attitude of a grouch, who has no reason for being such so close to Christmas. The problem is that Charles' publishers aren't too keen on a Christmas themed book, Christmas a minor holiday at best, and that to capitalize on Christmas, the book would have to be completed, including printed and distributed, within six weeks. As he continues to gather inspiration from events happening around him, Charles is guided in the physical world, much to the quiet consternation of his faithful wife Kate, by Tara, his Irish housemaid who he learned is quite well-read, and in the metaphysical world by the spirit of the story's central character, a wealthy but mean man named Scrooge, whose entrance into his psyche is complete with a Greek chorus of sorts. His writing is hindered by his parents' arrival: his father, John Dickens, with whom he has long had issue in his mismanagement of the family finances while Charles was growing up, a behavior that hasn't visibly changed. But the biggest issue in getting a completed manuscript to his satisfaction is that Scrooge seems to have a mind of his own against what Charles wants, which makes him question his ability as a writer and which only intensifies his temperamental nature. — Huggo In 1843, despite the fact that Dickens (Stevens) is a successful writer, the failure of his latest book puts his career at a crossroads, until the moment when, struggling with inspiration and confronting reality with his childhood memories, a new character is born in the depths of his troubled mind; an old, lonely, embittered man (Plummer), so vivid, so human, that a whole world grows around him, a story so inspiring that changed the meaning of Christmas forever. 1 more All