By Simon Thompson
Director Ti West and writer Nathaniel Halpern’s Ebenezer is a solid adaptation of Charles Dickens’s celebrated novella A Christmas Carol, featuring a well chosen cast, fantastic art direction, as well as a great deal of fidelity to the original source material.
Before going into the meat and potatoes, there will be some spoilers here and there, but given that A Christmas Carol is one of the most famous short stories ever written in English, and something that is so entrenched in popular culture you’d have to been living under a rock not to have encountered at least one retelling of it.
In Victorian London, Ebenezer Scrooge (Johnny Depp) a miserly, cruel, elderly businessman who despises every aspect of Christmas, is visited by the ghost of his long dead business partner Jacob Marley ( Ian McKellen), who warns Scrooge that he will be haunted by a further three spirits; the Ghost of Christmas Past ( Andrea Riseborough); the Ghost of Christmas Present ( Tramell Tillman); and the Ghost Of Christmas Yet To Come ( Robert Strange). Unless Scrooge changes his ways, he will end up like his old business partner Jacob Marley, chained by the weight of his greed and selfishness.
On the acting front, Depp makes for a good Scrooge, meeting the prerequisites of portraying both the cruel skinflint and the changed man with equal poise. Ian McKellen does his utmost with limited screentime as Jacob Marley, Andrea Riseborough is chilling as the Ghost Of Christmas Past, and Tramell Tillman is excellent as the Ghost Of Christmas Present, managing to come across as both jovial and hauntingly intimidating at the same time. The performance that surprised me the most however, was that of Rupert Grint as Scrooge’s long suffering, belittled clerk Bob Crachitt, with Grint delivering an emphatic and layered performance in the part.
The film looks great, with the Victorian London sets specially created by West fully capturing the gothic atmosphere and tone of Dickens’s original story. With his background in horror West really goes to town with the nightmarish side of the story, with the scene where Scrooge is shown Ignorance and Want being a particular highlight.
Overall Ebeneezer is a competent adaptation of the classic story, with its main flaw not being the film itself, but a poor marketing campaign that makes you think that it’s going to be another exaggerated Johnny Depp character piece (Mortdecai the horror… the horror), when actually he gives one of his better performances since about 2011. If you’ve got younger kids, West’s take on Dickens’s tale might be a little too scary for them, but if they’re a bit older and you both want to introduce them to the novella and kill two hours, then given how bad the Christmas release schedule usually is, you could do a hell of a lot worse.
