A Christmas Carol
I’m back to critique what many will view as an unexpected choice in medium considering what I’m usually up to on here. However, not only is A Christmas Carol the horror novel of the holiday season, it also happens to be my favorite story of all time. And so it is a shame that I must confess how unfulfilling this FX adaptation is.
You don’t need to be a big reader to know the story of the greedy English businessman who gets visited by Christmas ghosts; we all generally remember how it goes. References to Scrooge and A Christmas Carol are everywhere. Broadway has revived it time and again, and there have been some monumental film versions that are likely collecting dust in the form of VHS in a lot of our parents’ basements. But hopefully no one ever has to pay money to watch the 2019 revival because, consequently, being boxed up in a basement is the only suitable place for this one.
The novel seems to be used as a referential suggestion; I don’t think Dickens ever thought about beginning his book with a child taking a piss on Jacob Marley’s tombstone. Yet it is public urination that rouses him from the grave to warn Scrooge of his projected demise if he doesn’t change his ways.
Guy Pearce is a good-looking man, and being dressed up in 1843’s best duds can’t take that away. In fact I don’t even think he’s poorly cast. I just don’t like most of his lines. A lot of the power of the story comes from the Dickensian dialogue, and what it is replaced with isn’t very good. Not only that, this is probably the first version of A Christmas Carol to feature profanity. Not even Guy’s handsome face can save him from how awkward he sounds when his character says ‘fuck.’
Something else I didn’t like: the Christmas past sequence. I give FX credit in trying to spice things up for modern audiences, but do we really need to “me-too” young Ebenezer Scrooge? A hard implication is made related to Scrooge being sexually abused by a priest at his boarding school, and I really don’t think we need this in here. And speaking of things we didn’t need, when his sister shows up to bring him home for the holidays, she is packing heat to ward off Ebenezer’s child predator.
I’ve always been a sucker for the darker, more traditional versions of this story, so when I first saw an ad for this I knew I was going to make time for it, no matter what I heard. Yet my review seems to be more or less the consensus. For the scary, more faithful telling of this tale, the movie with Patton is still the best one.
