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The silent Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come (Jim Carrey) is actually portrayed as Scrooge’s shadow-or rather Scrooge’s shadow transforms into it. At first, I found this somewhat anticlimactic. (Does Scrooge really fear this specter more than any he’s seen so far? Didn’t he notice the giant laughing skeleton?) But the subtle creepiness of it grew on me and it is nice to see this adaptation being subtle about something.

Of course, the spirit doesn’t stay a flat shadow. After Scrooge urges it to hurry up and get this haunting over, it leaps off the floor, knocking him backwards. Scrooge falls through the wooden floor and tumbles down the stone steps of…OK, I haven’t written about this so far, but it’s about now that I’m really starting to get sick of how this Scrooge keeps falling over. It’s really not that funny. Anyway, he lands at the bottom of the steps of the London Stock Exchange in the future where he invisibly overhears some gentlemen (Cary Elwes, Paul Blackthorne and Julian Holloway) talking about how someone has died recently, and they really don’t care. They fade away as the day turns into a dark and still night. While I really don’t like what’s going to happen next, I have to give this moment credit for eeriness.

A giant shadow of a horse-drawn carriage (or possibly a hearse) appears against the pillars of the building. The horses’ heads turn revealing themselves to be fearsome, red-eyed monsters. The ghost points at Scrooge and the horses and carriage leap into three dimensions and tear after him.

As Scrooge runs down an alley, the driver cracks his whip and either the alley grows bigger or Scrooge grows smaller. Other spooks try to reach out from the sides and try to grab him, cackling.

Yeah, this is the nadir of the movie.

I once wrote that I didn’t mind adapters doing things like adding actions scenes to Dickens stories since Dickens was always a popular writer.^[1]I’ll admit I was mainly thinking of the way the 1982 Nicholas Nickleby adapted the arrest of Squeers and the 2002 one adapted John Browdie’s rescue of Smike. But A Christmas Carol is one Dickens book where that simply doesn’t make sense. Or if there is a way it could make sense, this isn’t it. While the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come is definitely meant to be scary, he’s not a villain. His goal is to help Scrooge, not kill him. If you’ll pardon me for stereotyping, I suspect the people who mainly watch action movies and for whom this scene was created are the kind of people who wouldn’t appreciate the surreal storytelling and lack of clear character motivation.

I guess you can say this visual represents Scrooge trying to escape his own mortality. But what’s the symbolism behind him shrinking? As far as I can tell, it was done so his voice could get all high and chipmunk-y because that guarantees hilarity. (Please note my sarcasm.) I will say there’s a great moment when tiny Scrooge briefly seems to have escaped the death carriage, only for it to come barreling out from around a corner. Before running away, Scrooge gets an irritated look on his face and squeaks in disgust, “oh, come now!”

That moment perfectly summarizes my reaction to this scene.

Scrooge ends up sliding down a drainpipe and over a rooftop. The scene drags on and on and would you like to know what’s really horrifying about it? It was almost even longer. To confirm this, check out the deleted scenes. There’s one at least for whose deletion I am truly grateful.

Anyway, Scrooge falls into a sack that a woman, Mrs. Dilber (Fionnulla Flanagan), brings into Old Joe (Bob Hoskins)’s rag and bone shop. As the two of them unpack the contents, we learn that she is selling the bedcurtains and clothing of her recently deceased employer, who died alone and unloved with no one to prevent such theft. While there were three thieves in the book, this adaptation manages to include all the most horrifying and hilarious lines from the scene. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see why Scrooge would be paying attention to this crucial dialogue while he’s busy navigating the world the size of a mouse.

The scene ends with Old Joe noticing a rat on the floor and trying to hit it with a poker, almost flattening Scrooge in the process. He upends a floorboard, catapulting Scrooge across the room. He is caught by the hand of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come (sort of) and comes out the other side in a room in a completely different building. Scrooge returns to his normal size, making me wonder yet again what the point was of it changing in the first place, and tells the spirit he understands that his life tends the same way as that of the mysterious dead man. Under the circumstances, shouldn’t Scrooge be demanding why the ghost was just chasing him in a terrifying death carriage a little while ago? No, that never comes up.

But I can’t criticize the adaptation too much at this point because we now get an awesomely spinetingling scene from the book that often gets cut.^[2]The 1984 and 1999 movies are among those that keep it. Scrooge finds himself in a dark bedroom with no one in it except a corpse covered by a sheet. The spirit gestures for Scrooge to look at its face.

A nervous Scrooge first requests to see anyone who feels emotion at the man’s death. The ghost points at a wall, which then opens up into a portal. As with Christmas Present, I don’t understand why Scrooge has to be physically present for some things and just watches others on ghostly television. But, again, this is a scene that is far too often omitted by adaptations.^[3]The 1999 movie does it very well. Scrooge sees a poor couple (Callum Blue and Fay Masterson) who owe the dead man money^[4]I don’t know why I’m being so coy about his identity. and are relieved that the payment will now be delayed long enough for them to get the necessary amount.

Desperate, Scrooge demands to see some tenderness connected to death. Suddenly, he is seated on a stairway in the Cratchit home sometime earlier in the future. He witnesses the family grieving in the room below and gets a glimpse of Tiny Tim’s corpse in the room above. Everyone’s acting is great in this scene. At least, their vocal performances are great and I assume the rest of their acting is too. But this is one those scenes that I don’t think motion capture does very well. In particular, there’s a moment where Scrooge comes face to face with the devastated Bob Cratchit. Clearly, his face is supposed to be conveying something highly dramatic, but I honestly can’t tell what.

Afterwards, Scrooge asks about the identity of the man he saw lying dead. The floor gives way beneath him (because we obviously needed more of Scrooge falling) and he plummets down into a snowy, stormy graveyard at night. The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come is looking a lot more like how I imagined this adaptation would portray him.

The ghost points at a gravestone and snow instantly blows off it, revealing the name, Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge promises that he’s not the man he was and begs for another chance. (Jim Carrey’s performance really is good here.) As he speaks, the snow beneath his feet starts to give way like quicksand. Scrooge finds himself holding onto a root, dangling over his own grave. An open coffin lies at the bottom, illuminated by a hellish red light.

I’m not a huge fan of this since, while mortality is definitely a theme in this part of the story, a careful reading of the text shows that what Scrooge really fears is not death itself (after all, he’s going to die eventually whether or not he persists in his miserly ways) but, like Marley, never being able to turn his life or public perception of him around. An immediate threat of death distracts from that crucial point.

But what really disappoints me about this scene is its lack of craziness. I can name at least four other Christmas Carols that do some version of this falling-into-the-grave scenario.^[5]They are Mickey’s Christmas Carol, the 1970 musical, Scrooge, the 1988 parody/homage, Scrooged, and the 1999 movie adaptation. The flying see-through floor in the Christmas Present section of the movie may have been ill-advised and the death carriage chase scene downright stupid, but they were also things that no other Christmas Carol had ever done. To climax with something so unoriginal feels like a letdown.

The spirit leans down over Scrooge and as lightning flashes, we get a glimpse of its face.

Scrooge cringes but continues pleading for help. The ghost pries Scrooge’s fingers off the root and lets him fall. This bothers me since Dickens portrayed the previously impervious phantom as wavering and pitying Scrooge at this point. But, on reflection, that could still be true in this version since you can, if you wish, interpret Scrooge’s fall as what causes him to wake up in his own bed on Christmas morning.

Here’s a quick point by point replay of the next few scenes.

In a borrowing from the 1951 movie, Scrooge sees Mrs. Dilber and terrorizes her with his newfound joy. It’s not as hilarious as the longer one in that movie, but it’s pretty fun.

Scrooge buys a huge turkey for the Cratchits and sends it anonymously. Afterwards, he hitches a ride on the back of a carriage just as he sneered at two boys for doing at the beginning of the movie.

As he walks down the street, Scrooge meets one of the charity collectors from the night before and gives him a generous donation.

Scrooge gets another interaction with the carolers at whom he glared seven years ago. It’s actually one of my favorite bits that’s not from the book, so I won’t spoil it.

There’s a nice twist to Scrooge attending his nephew’s party. He shows up at an extremely awkward moment and it briefly looks like his reception will be cold before everyone rushes to embrace him.

The reason I’m skimming through all this, besides the fact that this series has gone on longer than anyone cared to read it, is there’s really not much to say about this part of the movie. Nothing is really wrong with these scenes and even quite a bit right about them, but because the film has treated Scrooge like a punching bag for so long, they don’t pack the emotional punch they should.

After Scrooge gives Cratchit a raise the next day, Bob directly addresses the camera with some closing narration even though no character has done anything like that prior to this. Not that I have anything against narration, especially when it draws from Dickens, but the movie had been doing a fine job of telling the story without it.^[6]I mean it’s had plenty of problems but none of them were due to the lack of a narrator. It’s like it just got lazy at the end.^[7]I think a really clever and creative ending for A Christmas Carol adaptation would be to show an adult Tiny Tim visiting Scrooge’s grave at Christmas, confirming that he was able to change his … Continue reading We close with the iconic image of Scrooge carrying Tiny Tim on his shoulder. Again, rather generic for such an inventive adaptation, but after the wackiness of that crazy chase scene and the incredible shrinking Scrooge, you could argue that’s a relief.

I probably watch this movie every December which is probably way more than it deserves. But I don’t think it deserves to never be watched at all. If nothing else, I’d say it’s better than Robert Zemeckis’s other mocap Christmas movie, The Polar Express, and while I haven’t seen his other attempt at adapting a classic of English literature with motion capture, Beowulf, nothing I’ve heard about it leads me to believe it’s better than A Christmas Carol.^[8]Though I will give Beowulf credit for having the brains to adapt something that actually lends itself to an action movie. And while more psychologically driven cinematic retellings have come closer to the heart of the story, there’s something to be said for one that focuses on surreal and fantastic imagery, a major aspect of the book that some previous adaptations didn’t have the technology to reproduce even if they’d tried to do so. It’s true that this movie has some of the stupidest moments in any Christmas Carol adaptation, but, in my opinion, it also has some of the best moments.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

As the clock strikes one again, Scrooge sees light coming from the adjoining room and hears the sound of booming laughter. He opens the door to the find that his house has been redecorated and that the Ghost of Christmas Present (Jim Carrey) is seated on a mountain of holiday food.

Apart from Marley, Christmas Present is the ghost whose physical appearance most closely matches his description in the book. The script even calls attention to the detail of him wearing an empty scabbard. This is the opposite of subtle but, in all fairness, I never thought of the scabbard’s significance prior to watching this movie.

While this spirit may look just as Dickens described him, the movie arguably tries to make him a little creepy in a way the book didn’t. There’s something subtly unnerving about the way he constantly laughs whether there’s anything to be jovial about or not.

Unlike some adaptations, such as the 1951 and 1984 movie versions, which have Scrooge be a more reluctant convert, this one follows the book by having him humbly tell the ghost to conduct him where he will. The spirit dangles the cord of its robe for Scrooge to clutch and its edible throne magically lowers itself. Then we get one of the movie’s most interesting improvisations. The floor beneath them becomes transparent^[1]I kept expecting Scrooge to fall through it at some point of this scene but surprisingly he doesn’t. and the upper story seems to rise off the building and fly across town, giving Scrooge a look at Christmas Day. (In a great little bit of continuity original to this adaptation, Scrooge briefly sees the boy (Ryan Ochoa) whom he will send to get a turkey for the Cratchits when he experiences this day again in real time.)

I’m not sure if this visual actually serves the story. Having the ghost be above the Christmas revelers rather than on the same level with them means we lose the idea that the presence of Christmas is what allows these people to be so joyful despite their bleak surroundings and circumstances. On the other hand, this scene is fun to watch, it gets points for creativity and unlike some other…creative aspects of this adaptation, it’s not totally stupid. At least there’s some clear symbolism as Scrooge is seeing things from a larger perspective than usual. It’s not just weird looking for weirdness’s sake. And the scene gets credit for including a rousing nondiegetic chorus of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, my favorite traditional carol and one which arguably relates thematically to the story of A Christmas Carol as it mentions sinners being reconciled to God. I kind of wish they could have included lyrics from the second verse rather than just repeating the first. Were they deemed too religious for a secular movie? If so, this seems like a weird choice of song to include at all.

Speaking of religion, this movie includes an interesting bit from the book cut by every other film adaptation.^[2]Some audio drama versions may include it but if so, I can’t remember which ones. As they fly over a bakeshop, Scrooge accuses the spirit of hypocrisy. In Dickens’s day, bakeshops traditionally allowed poor people without ovens of their own to use theirs. Certain Christians advocated these shops being closed on Sundays. The ghost sternly tells Scrooge that some people “do their deeds of ill will and selfishness in (my) name” and are “as strange to me and my kin as if they had never lived.” I’m always excited when a Christmas Carol adaptation includes something usually omitted, but I have to say this inclusion doesn’t make a lot of sense. How many modern viewers even know what Scrooge and the ghost are talking about here?^[3]The movie tries to make the meaning a little clearer by having the ghost refer to “men of the cloth,” though the clergy weren’t necessarily the only ones advocating businesses being … Continue reading Of course, modern viewers also aren’t going to be familiar with debtors’ prisons or union workhouses, and the word, “treadmill,” brings to their minds an exercise tool^[4]though some may still regard it as an instrument of torture, and I’m sure no fan of the book would want references to those things to be cut. Still, it seems rather random to include what amounts to a(n eloquent) disclaimer on Dickens’s part while not showing things that are more relevant to the business of the scene like how the spirit of Christmas helps people put aside their quarrels, temporarily at least. That being said, it is an interesting moment and I’m not one to criticize a Christmas Carol movie for being too true to the source material.

The bakeshop provides a nifty transition to the next scene. The young Cratchit twins (Ryan Ochoa and Samantha Hanratty) walk by it and smell their goose cooking inside or believe they do anyway. The two of them rush home, but the ghost beats them there and sprinkling incense from his torch on the roof, allows Scrooge to see through it (and the upper floors.) I really like the character designs for the Cratchits, who, true to Dickens’s description, are “not a handsome family” but are “happy, grateful, pleased with one another and contented with the time.”

The actors are all great too. This Bob Cratchit really manages to sell his line about Tiny Tim (Gary Oldman) wishing for people to notice his disability to remind them of “who made lame beggars walk and blind men see,” something which can across as treacly on the page or on the screen.^[5]Weirdly, The Muppet Christmas Carol actually might have done the best job of selling that line. What makes it work is the way Bob’s voice breaks and the pained expression on his wife (Lesley Manville)’s face. Clearly, neither of them really believes their youngest son is ever going to walk or even live another year.

Unfortunately, this scene of the Cratchit family’s Christmas is way too rushed. We don’t even really see them eat their meal. They just sit down to it and drink a couple of toasts. As I wrote in my last post, this movie doesn’t focus much on scenes of partying, which were arguably the heart and soul of the book. Part of it may be that the filmmakers were reluctant to add to Dickens’s dialogue as slower paced adaptations of this scene must. While I doubt anything with which they came up would be better than what Charles Dickens would have written, breezing through the scene is to be false to the book in another way. As it is, it’s hard to understand why Scrooge would suddenly care about this family so much.

There are some nice touches though. Mrs. Cratchit gets a line about wishing the children might taste a turkey one day, setting up Scrooge giving them a giant one later. And the spirit’s reaction when Scrooge tries to slink away during Mrs. C’s rant against him is hilarious.

Scrooge begging for Tiny Tim to be spared is moved from the middle of the scene to the end of it. When the ghost throws his words about decreasing “the surplus population” back in his face, the movie takes advantage of the characters being played by the same actor and has his face and voice briefly morph into Scrooge’s.

The book had a great “montage” here of Scrooge and the ghost flying over the world, seeing poor miners, lighthouse keepers and men at sea celebrating Christmas. It’s cut from adaptations fairly frequently^[6]Though the 1999 movie does justice to it beautifully., but its absence here is really frustrating since it would have fit in perfectly with this movie’s rollercoaster aesthetic and gone a good way toward making up for this section of the film’s shortcomings.^[7]Sure enough, if you check out the deleted scenes, you’ll find that such a scene was planned and filmed. Instead, the Ghost of Christmas Present whirls his torch around his head and transports himself and Scrooge to the latter’s nephew’s Christmas party. (Why do the see-through floor thing for some of Christmas Present but not all of it? Your guess is as good as mine.) The nephew rags on his uncle, but ultimately expresses pity for him and wishes him well. This scene gets trimmed even more than the last one, which is more common for adaptations, but unfortunate since there’s a case to be made that it was even more crucial to Scrooge’s character development in the book.

Then Scrooge and the spirit are inside a clocktower. It’s about to strike midnight which will mean the end of the Christmas holiday and the ghost’s life. (The movie’s done a great job of having him age throughout the preceding scenes.) Scrooge notices a claw poking out from his robe. The ghost pulls it back to reveal two grotesque feral children, the personifications of Mankind’s Ignorance and Want (Ryan Ochoa and Samantha Hanratty.)

Scrooge asks if they don’t have anyone to help them. Those familiar with this scene from the book, or other adaptations that include it, will remember that at this point the ghost, again, throws Scrooge’s previous words back at him. Will this movie redo its old trick of having the spirit look and sound like Scrooge for these lines? No. Whatever else can be said against it, this Christmas Carol is too imaginative for that, and we get one of its best visual flourishes. Ignorance himself gets the line about prisons and as he says it, he transforms into a dangerous looking man (Kerry Hoyt) wielding a knife who gets locked in a cage. Want gets the line about workhouses and transforms into a hysterical woman (Julene Renee) who gets put in a straitjacket and dragged away.

Not only is this really freaky, but it shows the filmmakers thought about the historical context of Dickens’s writing and social commentary. I’m not sure if it was necessary though to have the Ghost of Christmas Present turns into a skeleton and disintegrate, laughing all the time.

Given how this adaptation is amping up the horror elements of the original book, I’m very intrigued at this point to see what they’ll do with the third and scariest ghost. Turns out what they do is both too much and not enough.

Next Week: The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come Makes Scrooge Feel Small.

Scrooge awakens to the sound of the clock chiming one-the very time his first ghostly visitor is supposed to arrive. In the book, he actually awakens at twelve and is shocked since it was two when he went to bed and the sky is still dark. The pacing purposes for which this was cut are very understandable, but the omission is still somewhat unfortunate since it establishes that Scrooge is now and for most of the story outside of time somehow. Without this, The Ghost of Christmas Present showing him Christmas Day, which should technically have already happened, and him later going back and experiencing that exact same day are a bit confusing.

In the book, when the Ghost of Christmas Past appears, its hand specifically draws back the curtains in front of Scrooge’s face. Here various curtains are drawn apart and a searchlight of sorts shines through, searching for Scrooge before finding him. I’m not really sure what the point of that change was. It strikes me as making the spirit less intimidating. I guess Robert Zemeckis wanted to build anticipation for its appearance.

Christmas Past (Jim Carrey) is the spirit who looks the least like Dickens described it by a long shot. In keeping with the giant candle snuffer it carries, its robe suggests a giant candle and its head is a flame hovering over it. This was probably inspired by the way the book describes this ghost’s shape as flickering “being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body.” ^[1]The 1971 animated short directed by Richard Williams is one of the only adaptations that has tried to capture this. Watching it, I can understand why most don’t. I don’t think anyone would really argue that this improves on Dickens’s description, but I don’t dislike it. I do dislike Carrey’s vocal performance as this particular spirit though. His attempt to make it sound “singularly low as if instead of being so close beside (Scrooge), it (was) at a distance” basically consists of sounding overly breathy. After introducing itself, the ghost floats backwards out of the room, only to reappear at the opposite side of Scrooge’s bed as if it’s gone all the way around the world. It’s weird and random but I don’t dislike it. Then it does a weird little dance, not like this movie suddenly turned into a musical^[2]Given some of what we see, that might actually happen!, but like it just wanted to dance for some reason. It’s weird and random and I do dislike it.

Speaking of music, you can hear the tune of O Come All Ye Faithful or Adeste Fidelis on the soundtrack as the spirit introduces itself. This is the first, I believe, of several traditional carols used as background music in the movie. They all work very well.

As the spirit firmly takes Scrooge’s hand and leads him toward the window, we see it rise and, in a nice touch, the night outside turn to day. Scrooge and the spirit fly over across a snowy wood. This is different from the book where they are transported instantly, and it’s obviously done to include more action and eye candy. But I don’t mind. In fact, I enjoy it. Unlike some of this adaptation’s other attempts to add action and eye candy to the story, this one at least makes sense.^[3]Could it have been an homage to two other Christmas Carol adaptations that Disney has produced (hint: one casts Bob Cratchit as a mouse, the other as a frog) which also have Scrooge and the Ghost of … Continue reading

Scrooge is overcome with emotion when they arrive at the village where he spent much of his childhood and when he invisibly observes his old schoolmates heading home for the holidays. Then he and the spirit fly to his dark and dank schoolhouse where they find Scrooge as a boy all alone, glumly staring out a window and half-heartedly singing Venite Adoremus. The contrast between him and the other boys we just witnessed laughing and merrily singing Here We Come A-Wassailing is great. This is easily the most emotionally powerful moment in the movie and when the young Scrooge frowns, we get a brief foreshadowing of his later bitterness, something no other adaptation I can recall has.

The spirit then shows another, later Christmas. A teenaged Scrooge is surprised by the appearance of his younger sister, Fan (Robin Wright Penn), who ecstatically tells him that their father has had a miraculous change of heart and that he (Scrooge) is finally to come home. The ghost gently reminds Scrooge that when she died, Fan left behind a child-Scrooge’s nephew whom he treated so coldly recently. After the really well-done emotional moment we just had, this one feels too fast paced and underwhelming, especially considering how important it should be for both Scrooge and the audience. (He’s reminded that he once loved somebody, and we realize he was even capable of that at some point.) Part of the problem may be the young Scrooge’s reaction to seeing his sister after what’s apparently at least a decade is strangely calm. (Maybe he can’t believe her news.)

The ghost and the (present) Scrooge have another flying scene, this one across London at night, before arriving at the warehouse where Scrooge was apprenticed. There’s a nice acting moment for Jim Carrey where we hear Scrooge laugh for the first time. His former master, Fezziwig (an underused Bob Hoskins), tells the younger Scrooge and his fellow apprentice, Dick Wilkins (Cary Elwes), to clear away the desks for a giant Christmas party he’s throwing. The movie cuts to that party-or rather the Ghost of Christmas Past does-where we see Fezziwig dancing with his wife (Jacquie Barnbrook.) Dickens described Mrs. Fezziwig as being a very capable dancer and this adaptation, in another bit of random weirdness, shows her twirling like a top and rising into the air for a moment. If the movie’s animation were more often cartoony, this might have been fun, but combined with the realistic movements of motion capture technology, it’s just awkward.

I really wish this scene of the party were longer and in particular that we got more of Scrooge’s reaction to it. This Christmas Carol generally lingers more over action scenes than party scenes. If you ask me, someone who doesn’t want to linger on a scene of joyful partying has no business adapting A Christmas Carol.^[4]It’s frustrating to check out the movie’s deleted scenes on Disney+ and see that a bit was cut of the spirit using reverse psychology on Scrooge. And they actually put a decent twist on … Continue reading On reflection though, the scene is actually of a fairly reasonable length. It’s just that nearly all of the focus is on Past-Scrooge meeting and dancing with a beautiful young woman named Belle (Robin Wright Penn.) It’s common for Christmas Carol adaptations to introduce her at this point in the story. (In the book, we first meet her when she’s breaking up with Scrooge and their entire relationship is left for us to infer.) This one is a bit unusual in that there’s no dialogue between the characters, the filmmakers perhaps realizing they couldn’t compete with Dickens when it came to that. Everything is meant to be conveyed through Scrooge and Belle’s eyes. I don’t think it works that well, live action being better than motion capture for that kind of acting and traditional animation arguably being better than either. Still, the music is lovely.

The spirit takes us to a later Christmas-without any flying this time-when Belle ends her engagement to Scrooge on the grounds that he’s changed so much that he’d never be happy marrying a penniless girl like her. The design for the Scrooge we see in this time is a perfect halfway point between the younger one at Fezziwig’s and the old and pinched looking one we met at the beginning of the movie. Much the same can be said of Jim Carrey’s performance. Part of me wishes the script hadn’t removed the character’s elaborate sarcasm about the “evenhanded dealing of the world” which made him more interesting and arguably appealing in a weird way. Presumably, Zemeckis felt modern audiences wouldn’t be able to understand it. Then again, he also kept the slang term, “walker,” so it can be hard to guess what the reasoning was.

Robin Wright Penn, meanwhile, is outstanding in this scene, delivering Dickens’s stagy dialogue^[5]I’m not criticizing the source material here. It’s meant to be stagy. with perfect ease and just the right emotion. In this moment at least, her portrayal of the character is my favorite.^[6]And it’s not like she’s the only actress to do a great job with this scene. Lucy Gutteridge in the 1984 film and Lucy Fraser in the 1999 one are also wonderful. But the first movie … Continue reading

Incidentally, the book had a final vision of Christmas past where Scrooge saw Belle celebrating with her loving husband and their many children while Jacob Marley, the closest thing he had left to a friend, lay dying. This was almost included in but ultimately cut from the movie. Part of me wishes it had stayed since I love it when Christmas Carol movies include scenes that are often cut.^[7]The 1984 one is among those that include that particular bit. But another part of me agrees with the filmmakers that it wouldn’t really have fit in with the movie’s pace.

What it does include from the book is Scrooge looking at the Ghost of Christmas Past’s face and seeing “fragments of all the faces it had shown him.”

This is a highly cinematic detail that hardly any Christmas Carol movies feature. Actually, this is the only one I can remember that does. I think the faces flicker by too fast for them to really register, but I give this adaptation a thousand kudos for the attempt.

Another thing from the book is an angry Scrooge clamping the ghost’s extinguisher cap over its head in a vain attempt to put out its light. What’s not from the book is that after he seems to have succeeded, the cap rockets up into the night sky with Scrooge before disintegrating into what looks like fairy dust. In what looks like it might be a visual reference to E.T.: Extra-Terrestrial, Scrooge flies past the moon before plummeting down onto the floor of his bedroom back in the present.

Um…what?

The literary Christmas Carol certainly isn’t lacking in surreal images but every one of them means something. For example, Scrooge wrestling with the Ghost of Christmas Past obviously represents his wish to forget painful, guilt inducing memories. What exactly was that little flight into space supposed to symbolize? I’d make a joke about the filmmakers being drunk or on drugs, but the sad thing about that little bit of action is that it was too complex and well put together for that to have been the case. Some people must really have thought it was a good idea. Ah, well. I’ll admit the scene made me laugh though I’m not proud of that. And at least it was short unlike some additions to the story that we’ll see in Christmas Yet to Come.

Next Week: Scrooge Gets a Lift From the Ghost of Christmas Present.

This Christmas, I’ll be doing something different on The Adaptation Station. I’ll be going through one particular adaptation, analyzing it scene by scene. I’m not doing it because I love Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol in Prose Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, more than the source materials of many of the other things I’ve covered on this blog. There are plenty I love equally. Neither is Robert Zemeckis’s 2009 animated adaptation one of my favorite retellings of the story^[1]Its official title is Disney’s A Christmas Carol to distinguish it from all the other Christmas Carol movies, but Zemeckis’s A Christmas Carol gives you a better idea of what to expect … Continue reading, though I do find it interesting. Hopefully, it’ll be interesting enough to benefit from the longer format. I hope readers enjoy this because I’d love to give some other movies this treatment. But naturally, those who haven’t seen this film yet and wish to avoid spoilers are also going to want to skip this series. Now that I’ve got that warning out of the way….

The movie’s first moments are pretty great, establishing the atmosphere of A Christmas Carol-or rather its two contrasting atmospheres, which might be called the Merry and the Scary. First, jolly, joyous music is heard on the soundtrack, and we get a beautiful of image of a well-to-do Victorian Christmas.

Then the music grows ominous as the camera pans down to a copy of A Christmas Carol. It flips open and we zoom in on the haunting (no pun intended) first words, “Marley was dead.” Then the page turns, and we’re confronted with an illustration of the man himself, a corpse with a bandage wrapped around its head, lying in a coffin.

The illustration dissolves into reality or rather into animation. The dead man’s business partner, Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey) signs the certificate of death, which is the first thing we’re told the character does in the book, so that’s pretty great adaptation.

Scrooge’s interactions with the undertaker (Steve Valentine) and his young apprentice (Daryl Sabara) do a great job of establishing his cold, miserly character and are quite entertaining in their morbid humor.

I’ve put off talking about the animation long enough. I don’t really like mocap animation. At least not for entire movies. There have been many live action ones that used it for individual characters with great success, but I’m not sure if there’s ever been a great movie entirely animated with motion capture. There’s always something about the human character’s faces that distracts me. That being said, I don’t hate it as much as many seem to do. And the movie’s backgrounds are quite beautiful. The character designs are also wonderfully Dickensian, that of Scrooge himself being a case in point, though I noticed some of them getting reused on a number of the background characters.

A quirk of Robert Zemeckis’s mocap movies is that they tend to have small casts with each actor playing multiple roles. I don’t really understand the point of this. Is it just cheaper that way? Do fewer actors balance out the cost of the technology itself or something? Is it just to show off the range of each member of the cast? Or is it something they do just to show that with motion capture they can?

Anyway, Scrooge leaves the undertaker and makes his way down the streets of London, stopping to silence some carolers with a look and scoff at some boys hitching a ride on the back of a carriage and, in a great nod to the book, scaring away a seeing eye dog.

As the opening credits roll, we get a montage of the city. The swooping, zooming cinematography makes it transparent that this movie was meant to be in 3D, but honestly, I love it. The soundtrack by Alan Silvestri is the best of any Christmas Carol movie in my experience. And the scene does a great job of establishing the cultural milieu of Charles Dickens. I especially love the vignette of the boys begging by the Lord Mayor’s house. It’s a bit weird though to spend so much time establishing the world seven years prior to the story’s main events.^[2]The 1999 made-for-TV Christmas Carol starring Patrick Stewart does the same thing by the way.

Cut to “seven Christmas Eves later,” Scrooge is counting money at his office while his poor clerk, Bob Cratchit (Gary Oldman) rubs his hands together for warmth and looks longingly at the coal box and the key to it on Scrooge’s desk. Scrooge’s nephew (Colin Firth) enters to invite him to Christmas dinner the next day with his wife. The two of them debate the merits of the holiday. After the nephew departs, two gentlemen (Cary Elwes and Julian Holloway) enter, asking for a donation to help the poor and needy. Scrooge coldly replies that the “surplus population” have the prisons and workhouses to take care of them. (The way Scrooge casually dangles the charity collectors’ credentials over a candle, nearly burning them, is a great little touch.) If you’re wondering why I’m summarizing so much of this, it’s because the dialogue in this scene is very close to the book, all but word for word. Since I love the book, I also love it and if you’re not a fan of the material, well, I’m sure you know enough not to bother with this movie at all. The acting ranges from good to great. At least, I think it does. It’s hard for me to judge mocap performances. Personally, I wish Colin Firth had been Scrooge. It seems like a role in which I’d be much more interested in seeing him. But it’s not as if he’s bad as the nephew or as if Jim Carrey were bad as Scrooge.

After Scrooge begrudgingly gives his clerk the next day off and locks up for the night, a jubilant Bob slides down the hill “in honor of its being Christmas Eve,” another fun little detail from the book. I didn’t think much about him wiping out and landing on his butt on my first viewing, but in retrospect, it’s a sign of things to come. Meanwhile, Scrooge arrives at his effectively creepy house.

On the doorstep, Scrooge drops his key. “Alter it!” he grumbles, an amusingly appropriate curse as the doorknocker in the frame with him at the moment is about to undergo a transformation. “Why do these things always happen to me?” he says after stooping down to retrieve the key. He doesn’t yet see what the viewer does: that his doorknocker has been replaced by the face of his deceased partner, Jacob Marley. Apart from its eyes being shut, it looks much as the book describes.

“It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression.”

Well, it doesn’t seem like part of its own expression in the movie at first. Then after Scrooge has stared at it for a little bit and reached out to touch it…

I’ve come to the realization, by the way, that I don’t really like jump scares in movies, mainly because once you figure out the concept, you start to expect them right before they happen which ruins the whole point. Being a character rather than a viewer though, Scrooge is effectively freaked out and falls backwards on the steps. When he looks up, the knocker is back to normal. Scrooge enters the house, lights a candle and makes his way up the stairs.

The movie includes the details of Scrooge, slightly on edge, double locking the door to his bedroom and checking the lumber room. Sadly, it doesn’t include Marley’s face reappearing in every image on the tiles around the bedroom fireplace. I don’t know why so few movies include that detail, given how cinematic it is and how often A Christmas Carol has been and continues to be adapted for the screen.^[3]The 1984 and 1999 films are among the few. As in the book, as Scrooge sits by the fire and eats gruel, all the service bells in the room begin to ring of their own accord, the noise growing to a thunderous clamor and after they’ve died down, Scrooge hears the sound of chains being dragged on the floor up the stairs and down the hall to his room. In your average Christmas Carol, these chains would be accompanied by pounding ominous music. Here they’re heard against a background of complete silence. The music only returns when the chained ghost of Marley (Gary Oldman) comes through the door. It works very well.

In general, Marley’s creepiness is highly effective. The way his eyeballs never quite look at Scrooge until they roll slightly down in their sockets is a great gross touch, though his spittle flying at Scrooge^[4]In 3d! is pretty stupid. The dialogue, in which he tells Scrooge how he (Marley) is doomed to wander the world in torment for eternity as punishment for the missed opportunities of his life and how the three spirits who will haunt Scrooge over the course of the next few nights are his only hope of escaping the same fate, is very faithful to the book. Unfortunately, there’s one really dumb part of this otherwise exemplary scene. At one point, as in book, the bandage around Marley’s face is removed and his jaw drops open. What’s not in the book is the attempt at comedy as Marley is unable to talk with a detached lower jaw and has to try to hold it up as he speaks. Not only is this not funny but the Zemeckis inexplicably chose to have it when Marley gives one his most pivotal speeches.

“Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

Why would you want the audience to be distracted during those words is beyond my imagination. Finally, Marley readjusts the bandaging, and you think the dumb joke is going to die, but no. He’s now rendered himself unable to speak and has to readjust it again. Let’s just say Marley’s eyes weren’t the only ones rolling at that point.^[5]To be fair, there was always a bit of grim humor in the way Dickens described Marley taking off the bandage “as if it were too warm to wear indoors.” The 1999 movie strangely decides to … Continue reading

As Marley departs out the window, his chains wrap around Scrooge’s chair, pulling it after him before vanishing. Scrooge leans out the open window and gets a glimpse of the spirit world.

This movie has the most emotionally intense depiction of the ghosts who, like Marley, “sought to interfere for good in human matters and had lost the power forever.” Dickens writes that Scrooge “had been quite familiar with one old ghost” crying over a homeless woman with an infant. That seems to be the case here, as Scrooge’s screams grow even louder when it looks up to face him. It flies towards the window, but Scrooge races to his bed and pulls the curtains shut. Right before he does so, we see the window close and the phantoms outside it disappear. It’s an imperfect but fairly promising start to the movie.

Next Week: The Ghost of Christmas Past is on Fire. Literally.