Ebenezer is a stream, not a ticket, because the trailer sold a haunted house and the movie mostly built one, right up until Johnny Depp opens his mouth.
Ti West’s A Christmas Carol opens Friday in a wide release across North America, PG-13 for “frightening material,” 116 minutes, on a reported $38 million budget. The marketing promised “the name you know, the story you don’t.”
It does not deliver that story. Nathaniel Halpern’s script stays close to Dickens, down to the way Hollywood Reporter notes it is split into “staves,” exactly as the novella was, with a prologue showing Jacob Marley alive and just as rotten as his partner.
West told Entertainment Weekly he wanted to give Scrooge logic. “In other adaptations, Scrooge is kind of an asshole, and then the rest of the characters are benevolent, perfect people,” he said. “And it was really our goal to try to balance that out to say that there’s much more of a gray area in the story.”
That is a genuinely good pitch for a ghost story. The film never quite cashes it, but it builds a world good enough to make up some of the difference.
Checco Varese’s cinematography and Eve Stewart’s production design are the reason the atmosphere holds. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich credits the pair with a London that looks “in dire need of Christmas cheer,” all fog and counting-house shadow, and Deadline’s Pete Hammond separately singles out Stewart’s period design and Varese’s dark lighting for setting the tone. Two critics who disagree on almost everything else about this movie agree on that.
The best set piece belongs to Tramell Tillman as the Ghost of Christmas Present. He decays across the film using roughly five or six different makeup looks, skin cracking like old pottery while he gets hearty right up until he can’t. “One of the beautiful moments is watching Scrooge clock the fact that he’s dying, that Present is dying,” Tillman said. TheWrap called him the film’s diamond. He earns that line by himself.
Then there’s Ian McKellen’s Marley, shown alive and just as grasping as Scrooge in the film’s prologue before he returns as a ghost in chains. Vulture’s Alison Willmore makes the sharpest call in any review of this movie: McKellen is “the only actor who’s able to bridge what Depp is up to in the rest of the movie, and to spark in his co-star one of his few touches of recognizably human behavior.” Marley’s ghost exits early. The film loses its best double act right when it needs one most.
A horror-tinged Christmas Carol needed a Scrooge who could carry a haunted house without mugging through it. It did not get one.
Ehrlich’s verdict is blunt: Depp is “absolutely insufferable,” and “he seems to have become very bad at acting.” TheWrap’s Amelia Emberwing hears Jack Sparrow under the whiskers, which tracks with everything in the trailer that sold this as a comeback vehicle.
The trailer did its job. It just sold the wrong performance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_Ozo1xUgbU
There’s a real concession here, and it’s worth making honestly. Deadline’s Hammond wrote that “Depp clearly is having a blast playing it to the hilt,” The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called him “in fact rather good” as Scrooge, and Critics Choice member Clarence Moye put him alongside George C. Scott among the modern Scrooges. AP’s Mark Kennedy went the other way entirely, giving it one star out of four and calling it a “horror-tinged holiday slog.” Both camps are watching the same scenes.
Teens and young adults who want spice with their holiday viewing will get a PG-13 Christmas Carol that, per Kennedy, “breathlessly borrows from modern horror conventions.” Dickens purists get a faithful structure wrapped in a marketing campaign that promised something new. Depp skeptics get two hours of being right.
Paramount spent $38 million on this and reportedly about $50 million more on marketing, with Depp’s $5 million salary carrying box office bonuses. Tracking has it near $20 million domestic and $20 million overseas. A Christmas movie with soft numbers can still hang around through December, and that math makes a mediocre opening survivable.
West is a filmmaker who treats the source with respect. Varese and Stewart gave him a London worth haunting. Then the studio handed the lead to a man doing a bit, and the bit won, because the bit is what got the movie financed.
Stream Ebenezer in December, once the lights are low and the expectations have gone lower with them.
