Ebenezer

by Mike McGranaghan

The interesting thing about Ebenezer is not that Johnny Depp plays Scrooge. In fact, that’s possibly the least interesting thing about it. Depp buries himself under make-up, gives a performance that’s big and broad, etc. We’ve seen him do that a million times. No, what’s interesting about the picture is that it was directed by Ti West, the horror filmmaker behind X, Pearl, and MaXXXine. Unsurprisingly, yet pleasantly, he leans into the eerier aspects of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” helping to set his adaptation slightly apart from the other umpteen adaptations we’ve seen over the decades.

The plot stays largely faithful to the source material. Depp is the nasty, Christmas-hating Scrooge who gets visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve and comes to see the error of his ways. Rupert Grint plays Bob Cratchit, Ian McKellen is Jacob Marley, Sam Claflin is Scrooge’s nephew Fred, and Daisy Ridley is Fred’s wife Clara. Smart casting of the ghosts benefits the movie. Andrea Riseborough is utterly creepy as the all-white (including eyeballs) Ghost of Christmas Past, while Tramell Tillman (Spider-Man: Brand New Day) has a towering presence as the Ghost of Christmas Present.

There has always been a tinge of horror in Dickens’ story. Ebenezer utilizes a lot of techniques to bring that more fully into the foreground. Aside from dark, gloomy cinematography, West incorporates traditional genre tropes: off-kilter camera angles, thick fog, and spooky lighting among them. CGI effects make the ghosts seem more ominous than in previous iterations. There are even a couple of jump scares to accentuate the mood. Nothing in the film is going to terrify anybody, but playing up the horror elements allows the terror Scrooge feels to become more palpable for the audience and adds a sense of fun in the process.

Depp goes typically over-the-top during the early scenes, chewing the scenery with abandon. Whereas other stars have portrayed Scrooge with meanness, he makes him a full-throttle asshole, cruel to people simply because he gets off on it. Thankfully, the actor scales back once the character begins to have his epiphany. A few scenes even find him delivering raw emotion, as when Scrooge sees his long-lost love or reminisces about his late sister. It’s a solid, if unremarkable turn.

One bizarre deviation from Dickens’ story does come off weirdly. There’s a bit involving two men who collect money for charity and are later revealed to be completely corrupt. These are the same men Scrooge callously brushes off in the opening minutes. Suggesting that people who do charitable works can be as dishonest as Scrooge himself seems counterintuitive to the tale’s message. Nathaniel Halpern’s screenplay does attempt to let that work in favor of Scrooge’s arc; it’s still a odd flex, though.

“A Christmas Carol” is easily one of the most adapted stories of all time. Do we really need another version? The answer, of course, is no. That said, it’s timeless for a reason. Sturdy construction and a moral we can all identify with make it ripe to be revisited. Ebenezer doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it just looks at the wheel from a slightly more horror-centric perspective. With good performances and suitably creepy visuals, that’s enough to provide some decent yuletide-themed entertainment.