A good-looking Guy is the weak link in this fine retelling
Who is your Ebenezer Scrooge? Alastair Sim? Albert Finney? Michael Caine, ably assisted by Kermit the Frog? Everyone has a favourite adaptation of A Christmas Carol. But while this new BBC One version of the Charles Dickens classic (from Peaky Blinders creator Stephen Knight) has many things going for it, I doubt it’s going to be top of anyone’s Christmas list.
The challenge of playing Scrooge is to keep the audience invested in your story despite the fact you’re playing a dreadful misanthrope whom everybody hates. Bafflingly, Guy Pearce has been cast in the lead role. At 51, but with a Hollywood handsomeness, he doesn’t bear the “old features” Dickens described. His stab at a London accent wasn’t terrible, but traces of his native Australian kept sneaking in.
He adequately conveyed the joylessness of “a man with an ice pick for a heart”. But he could have been playing a generic villain in any old drama, not one of the most famous characters in the literary canon. Pearce is a decent actor but here he sapped the life out of every scene he was in. Not that those scenes were doing him any favours: alone in a room accompanied by the interminable ticking of a clock, or droning on to poor Bob Cratchit (Joe Alwyn) for what felt like an eternity. That’s if you could make him out through the gloom; here’s hoping you watched it on an ultra high-definition telly, or the shots of Scrooge in his dimly-lit home will have played out like a pitch black night.
And all of that is a shame, because the rest of the drama was a fine retelling. From the opening scene, in which a boy relieved himself over the grave of Jacob Marley and addressed him with some choice language, this was clearly aiming to be more than a predictable period drama. Hurrah for that, because what is the point in remaking something unless you’re going to bring something different to the table? Knight imbued this with the same dark energy that he brought to Peaky
Blinders and Taboo.
It fell to the other actors to hold things together, and things instantly picked up when the focus was on them. Alwyn was excellent as Bob Cratchit, a character often played as hopelessly downtrodden but here given a sharp edge, barely containing his anger at Scrooge’s miserable ways. Tiny Tim was well played by 10-yearold Lenny Rush. Knight’s biggest innovation, though, was to give a prime role to Marley’s Ghost in the form of Stephen Graham, first encountered in his coffin. It is impossible for Graham to turn in a bad performance – although the costume department had supplied him with a bad wig – and he nailed the mixture of comedy and horror. “Your fate is bound to the soul of Ebenezer Scrooge… together and only together can you repent,” he was told after plunging into fiery purgatory. Graham’s grim-faced reply: “Then I’m without doubt stuck here for f---ing ever.”
If the swearing struck you as out of place, bear in mind Knight’s oft-expressed belief that people in past centuries talked very much as they do now – authors simply couldn’t put that in print. He has certainly ramped up the horror of Marley’s Ghost, including a scene in which Graham picked his severed jaw from the floor and reattached it. Knight has also given more prominent roles to female characters, notably Vinette Robinson as Mary Cratchit. And the identity of the Spirit of Christmas Present may have purists needing the smelling salts.
They may sound like bold contemporary updates, but Knight treated the source material with due reverence. The “bah, humbug” was present and correct. This is one of several Dickens adaptations he has planned for the BBC – “a boxset of Dickens’s most iconic novels” with a “visionary take”, as the corporation would have it. This one was coproduced by the American FX channel, which clearly has plenty of money to chuck at it: it looked handsome, there were plenty of extras and the snow looked real. The War
of the Worlds this was not.
The problem with A Christmas
Carol as festive entertainment is that you have to wait quite a while to reach the feelgood bit. If you stick this out for another two nights, you’ll get there. Otherwise, I can recommend the one with the Muppets. A Christmas Carol ★★★