It was happening across this version online a couple of years ago which actually first planted the seed of the idea in my mind for this blog - the fact that there are just so many vastly different versions of this one story doing the rounds...
Title:
It’s Christmas,
Carol!
Format:
TV movie
Country:
USA
Production
company:
Entertainment One Television, for the Hallmark Channel
Year:
2012 (it was first shown by Hallmark in the USA on
November 18th that year)
Length:
90 minutes
Setting:
Contemporary United States
Background:
Since it was launched in 2001, the Hallmark Channel in
the United States has devoted much of its programming in November and December
to seasonally-themed fair. These have included the commissioning of various of
its own new Christmas-themed productions, of which It’s Christmas, Carol! was merely the latest in a long line. This
wasn’t the first time they’d made a TV movie updating A Christmas Carol to a contemporary American setting with a female
lead, either, having previously done the same with A Carol Christmas in 2003, which we will doubtless come to on here
in due course!
Cast and crew:
Canadian actress Emmanuelle Vaugier stars as the film’s
Scrooge figure, Carol Huffler. She has the sort of face that made me convinced
I’d seen her in something else before, but looking through her credits there’s
nothing that seemed familiar to me. She has the look of something of a cross
between Angellina Jolie and Star Trek:
Voyager’s Jeri Ryan, though, so perhaps it was just that. She’s had
recurring roles in a variety of popular US TV series, including CSI: NY, Two and a Half Men and Smallville,
though, so will indeed be a familiar face to many.
She’s quite engaging as Carol when she’s an unpleasant
character at the beginning, but less convincing when she’s nice and friendly
following her redemption, especially in the scenes when she’s now being nice to
her staff – the character is a successful publisher in this version. One of
said staff is the character of Fred, a link to the original book in name only.
Fred is played like an over-the-top stock camp character from the 1980s by
Carson Kressley, not primarily an actor but evidently something of a reality TV
star in the US following his appearances on the show Queer Eye.
By far the most famous performer here though is Carrie Fisher, of Princess Leia fame, who takes the Marley role as Carol’s late boss, “Eve”
– another Christmas pun, you see…
Director Michael Scott seems to have made a career of
undistinguished TV movies, while screenwriters William Penick and Chris Sey don’t
seem to have done a great deal of anything else at all – or that’s found its
way onto the IMDb, anyway.
Underdone Potato:
We’re in modern day USA and the world of publishing, here
– it’s not made clear in the film, but I have read that it’s supposedly
Chicago. Carol is a successful but unpleasant publisher, so mean to her staff
that several of them are on the point of walking out to form their own company,
a plan formed during a drunken piss-up on Christmas Eve. Her Bob Cratchit
figure is her assistant, Kendra, whom Carol refuses to allow to have a transfer
to London to go with her boyfriend who is moving there with his job.
One noteworthy aspect of this film is that it’s set in a
world where A Christmas Carol exists
and is known about, and Carol becomes fully aware that she is experiencing her
own personal version of it. Early on, we see Carol’s mother and her carer
watching an adaptation on television – I think it’s the 1935 Seymour Hicks version, from the brief glimpse shown. Later in the film, Eve claims that
spirits have been visiting the Earth in this fashion for centuries, and that “Chuck was just the first person to write
about it.” I’m not sure I approve of Dickens’s imagination being denigrated
in such a fashion, or the over-familiarity of referring to him as “Chuck”!
Past:
After appearing to Carol in the toilets at a swish
publishing do, her former boss and mentor Eve – chainless, and not at all an
unpleasant character – takes on the role of all three spirits, past, present
and future. She first takes Carol briefly back to 1985, where in a nice little
gag we see a big sign for Back to the
Future playing at a cinema. We see how hard her mother worked to support
her as a child, then we fast forward to the year 2000 as book-loving Carol
meets fellow bibliophile Ben in a bookstore. Ben – the Belle character here, obviously
– is the wettest drip you can imagine, and quite why anybody would fall for him
is a mystery.
They exchange some horribly wooden dialogue about how
great books are, written by people who seem unlikely ever to have read any of
the authors mentioned – the most accurate line probably being Ben’s “you just listed all the greatest writers
ever.” Yes, presumably after Penick and Sey Googled “best writers ever.”
Still, at least Dickens gets a mention.
They move in together, but we see them split up in 2002
as Carol moves on with her career while
Ben continues to struggle to be a great writer.
 |
| Eve takes Carol back to 1985. |
Present:
It’s only at this point that Carol realises “I know this story…” Eve teasingly
wonders if she means Miracle on 34th
Street or It’s a Wonderful Life –
both of which have their own shades of the Carol
to them, of course – before perhaps inevitably mentioning Star Wars.
There’s a “landing in a pile of snow” scene which seems
to be something of a common feature of many adaptations of the tale, as they
travel to one of the locations Eve wants to show Carol. We see the struggles of
Tanya, a woman Carol fired, as well as how her attitudes are hardening Kendra
and how much her mother misses her.
Yet to Come:
The Yet to Come section is possibly the best part of the
film, and the one point at which they attempt to do something interesting with
the story and to put their own mark on it.
Carol having to look up the plot of the Carol online to find out it’s the future
next perhaps makes her seem a bit slow on the uptake, but the gag of Eve
pretending to be a reaper-type spirit is quite good fun. Where this section
scores is the fact that Carol isn’t the least bit surprised by being shown her
grave – “I know I die in the end,” is
her pragmatic response, and unlike so many of the more condensed adaptations of
the take, simply the sight of her own grave isn’t enough to scare her into
being a better person.
There’s also a nice idea in that she is shown a
potentially happy future, with friends and family around her at a pleasant
Christmas, and told this is merely one potential future, not necessarily what
will happen. Mind you, why anyone would want a lifetime with drippy Ben and
then her over-sugary grandchildren around her is beyond me.
What’s To-Day:
There’s no boy to call out of the window to, but a nice
modern equivalent is found in Carol phoning directory enquiries to ask what day
it is, before offering a cheerful “Merry
Christmas!” then having to apologise and offer a “Happy Hanukkah” instead.
She then manages a whirlwind tour of Christmas
merry-making, with employees apologised to, a whole load of Christmas
provisions bought for them (that was some doing on Christmas Day) before
managing to get to her mother’s who she hardly ever visits yet seems to live
close enough to get there and back to in not too much time, and then to Ben’s
sister’s for the big make-up with him.
There’s a very weird bit in Ben’s sister’s house where
she asks to be left alone with Ben’s typewriter with all the reverence of
someone asking for a few moments alone with a deceased loved one’s body.
Review:
This lacks most of the soul and all of the wit of the
original story, although it’s not completely and utterly charmless. There are a
couple of nice gags and one or two interesting touches, but it certainly lacks
any of the punch of the original, and as you’d perhaps expect for something
made for a greetings card company it’s all incredibly saccharine.
But it certainly looks
very nice, and even though it was probably quite a cheap-and-cheerful TV movie
by US standards, the production standards seem high across the board. Aside
from the two main male characters – drippy Ben and camp Fred – the cast are all
quite amiable and well-performed.
In a nutshell:
There are worse TV movies, and probably worse adaptations
of the Carol, but this isn’t a
version I would recommend anybody other than a fanatical completist seeking
out.
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