Jacey Bedford's Journal

This fictional version of how Charles Dickens, at a low ebb in his writing career, came to write A Christmas carol is full if self-referential quirks and peopled by a host of reliable British thesps as the characters running riot in Dickens imagination. Christopher Plummer steals the show as Scrooge, but in addition there’s Jonathan Pryce, Miriam Margolys, Simon Callow, Donald Sumpter. I thought at first there was an echo of Shakespeare in Love (when Shakespeare hears ‘a plague on both your houses’ and it comes back out of his pen with a different twist) but this was much more upfront. The characters take over Dickens imagination and lay waste to the creative process until he finally gets it. Dan Stevens plays the beleaguered Dickens snatching inspiration from people he meets, such as the cadaverous waiter (Sumpter) who becomes Marley. It’s cheesy with a light touch, easy to swallow, and probably destined to be one of those films that crops up regularly on afternoon TV in December.