In this new adaptation of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge (Guy Pearce) has pressured Mrs. Cratchit (Vinette Robinson) into having “intercourse” with him so he’ll pay for Tiny Tim’s (Lenny Rush) surgery. This is a part of his past, and is shown to him by the respective Christmas spirit.
As she’s uncomfortably undressing, Scrooge monologues about human nature and how anyone can give up on their morals when properly pressured (or whatever). This monologue is a payoff for a conversation he had earlier with Bob Cratchit (Joe Alwyn) about why people bad every other day of the year are only nice on Christmas and wonders why we don’t do the opposite (essentially proposing The Purge).
After a gratuitous ass shot, he reveals that he never wanted to have sex with her. He doesn’t much care about things like intercourse anymore, he simply wanted to have an intercourse with the mind (or, once again, whatever) and wanted to prove that even good people can give up on their morals and that we live in a society.
While this doesn’t get into all of the plot changes in this new Christmas Carol, this serves as an appropriate summary of the adolescent nature of this new adaptation. Priding itself in how much “darker” and more “serious” it is, its ideas and script have all the substance of a Wikipedia plot summary. Characters repeatedly point out their driving themes, motives, all in the most thankless of ways. Beyond the mere fact that they’re explaining their motives, there’s little indication of character in their dialogue, in the way they speak. Everyone just blurts out what they’re thinking and how they feel in ways that don’t distinguish themselves.
To drive this point; if you have a character who thinks robbery is good, and one who thinks robbery is bad, and your only means of distinguishing them in their dialogue is having one say “I think robbery is a good thing” and the other says “I think robbery is a bad thing”, you are not effectively using the dialogue to distinguish the characters.
This wouldn’t bother me so much if it wasn’t for two things; my love for this story, and my love for Steven Knight’s Locke. The script for that film is brilliant for reasons I won’t be able to get too into in this brief review, but the dialogue beautifully harmonizes character, narrative, theme and location. Given that the film entirely consists of a man’s life going to shit over the series of phone conversations in a car, everything has to be revealed through dialogue, but what they say and how they say it is determined by the dynamics of the different characters and the progression of the story. Even his personal vents to his non-existent father speak to Locke’s own character in a unique way. There’s certainly “theme dialogue” but it’s all appropriate to the previously mentioned dynamics and progression of the story, and it all reveals something about the characters beyond “this is what I feel”.
Going further, the movie has many character details that may be revealed through dialogue that are not specifically called out by dialogue. For example; at one point in the movie, Locke is about to say sorry to his wife, but stops himself short, instead saying “I have behaved not at all like myself.” Later, he speaks to another character to whom he is practically begging and outright, sincerely says “I’m sorry” to the man for intruding on his night. The man listens to him because of this sincerity and apology. At no point does his wife then say “if only you apologized; you were always so bad at it!”, nor does the man he later speak to say “you know….a good apology goes a long way….you must be a hit with your wife!”
It’s a spoken trait that goes unspoken.
There’s none of this in A Christmas Carol, and to see a writer who made a film I love handle a story I adore with such artless dialogue and adolescent aspirations of being “dark” and “adult” is heartbreaking. I’m not against these and other ambitions Knight had with writing this film; A Muppet Christmas Carol may be one of my favorite adaptations of the tale, but I know this story of hope and redemption is a dark one, and I love that it is. I’m also not against his exploration of the afterlife for characters like Marley (Stephen Graham) and adding more stakes to Ebenezer’s change of heart beyond his own fate. And in addition to these conceptual possibilities, the film has its moments, great set design, and many of the performances are strong (Graham’s Marley and Robinson’s Mrs. Cratchit are the highlights here).
But this is nonsense. Just….nonsense. And I hope, rather than making the sequel that the closing shot teases (that’s not a joke), they decide to remake this interpretation with better writing and fewer tasteless implications of rape.
devilsadvocritic 