Here for lovers of Dickens – and fans of subtext – is an unexpectedly watchable new movie version of A Christmas Carol starring a top-hatted and heavily madeup Johnny Depp; it is a film about whether it’s possible for a man to earn redemption before it is too late. (The answer is … sure, as long as you say sorry and change your ways. But Mr Scrooge never launched a libel action against the Sun for calling him an un-Christmassy old meanie.)
In fact, screenwriter Nathaniel Halpern and director Ti West have put together a perfectly serviceable, faithful adaptation – a tradaptation, if you will – of Dickens’s masterpiece about the hideous old miser saved from damnation on Christmas Eve by the appearance of three Christmas ghosts, from yuletides past, present and future. It sticks to the accepted narrative beats and more or less all the familiar episodes, but with a few twists.
There is a witty and ingenious new prologue sequence in which Scrooge’s equally grumpy partner Jacob Marley, played by Ian McKellen, is still alive, going into a full Stadler-and-Waldorf double-act with his old colleague. (Wait – did The Muppet Christmas Carol inspire this?) And West shows us his scary-movie style by having that scene coming to a disturbing close with a kettle’s eerie whistle as it comes to the boil.
As well as pointedly asking about prisons and workhouses, Scrooge now actually accuses the charitable gentlemen of stealing the donations themselves, and there’s a terrible new end in store for cheerful Mr Fezziwig, which the film suggests is what finally embittered Scrooge against the undeserving poor. His lost love Belle is here a novelist, an idea borrowed from romance author Michelle Griep. Andrea Riseborough, Tramell Tillman and Robert Strange play the three ghosts; Rupert Grint is his pinch-faced clerk Bob Cratchit, and Sam Claflin is his cheerful nephew Fred, son of his once adored sister Fanny.
As Scrooge himself, Depp is in fact rather good; theatrically bad-tempered and petulant and, as with his Jack Sparrow, I suspect Depp’s comedy timing and sonorous British accent might have been learned from his old Fast Show comrade Paul Whitehouse. He is better at the unredeemed Scrooge than the saved version at the end, where some of the abject pathos is missing.
This is a decent enough new version, avoiding any big new revisionist takes which might have clunked, though perhaps Dickens himself might not have agreed with the church scene and the solemn use of Silent Night to accompany the Christmas-everywhere montage. He might have pictured something more secular.
• Ebenezer is out on 12 November in Australia and 13 November in the UK and US
