Title:
A Carol
Christmas
Format:
TV movie
Country:
USA
Production
company:
MAT IV
Productions, for Hallmark Entertainment
Year:
2003 (first
broadcast on the Hallmark Channel in the USA on December 7th that year)
Length:
85 minutes
Setting:
Contemporary
United States
Background:
I think I ought
to create a new category here on the blog for ‘Contemporary US adaptations with a female lead’. There have been several of them in TV movie form since the
1990s, creating their own sub-genre of Carol adaptations. This
particular one was made for the Hallmark Channel, a US cable network
specialising in miniseries and TV movies, and who have often commissioned festive-themed efforts which turn up on TV at Christmas time on other
channels around the world in the following years. The similar It’s Christmas, Carol! from 2012 is another such example, which I reviewed back in the first year of this blog.
And like that one, this also has a sci-fi superstar dropping in…
Cast and crew:
He’s not the main
star, but undoubtedly the biggest name here is Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner, as the Ghost of Christmas Present. The star, Tori Spelling as this
production’s version of Scrooge – ‘Carol Cartman’ – was also best known for a
TV role, in Beverley Hills, 90210 in the 1990s. Shatner’s in esteemed
company among the spirits, with Oscar nominee James Cromwell popping up as Yet
to Come.
Childhood sitcom
star Gary Coleman is another of the ghosts, making this something of a
collection of well-known US TV faces. Michael Landes, who played Jimmy Olsen in
Lois & Clark (or The New Adventures of Superman as it was
known in the UK) until he got fired for looking too much like the star Dean
Cain, here plays another Jimmy.
Director Matthew Irmas had written, produced and directed three films of his own in the 1990s,
but A Carol Christmas appears to be the last major credit on his CV. Writer
Tom Amundsen has a slightly more extensive list of credits, mostly on various
American TV series.
 |
| She's called Carol, and it's Christmas, get it? |
Underdone Potato:
Carol Cartman is
the star of her own self-titled daytime TV chat show, based in Los Angeles. We
meet her when she’s preparing for a live Christmas Eve special, generally being
rude to her staff – including personal assistant Roberta and… um… Jimmy,
whatever the hell Jimmy’s job is, it’s not clear – and buying all the crew soap
for Christmas. Why she’s left it until Christmas Eve to sort out their gifts is
a bit of a mystery.
She gets a visit
from her sister Beth, who brings hand-made presents from her niece and nephew,
which Carol coolly dismisses. Beth invites her to “Christmas Eve dinner,” as if
that’s a thing, but is sent packing – although Carol does send Roberta to buy
gifts for her niece and nephew, so right from the start we’re shown she’s not completely
heartless.
As Carol lies
down for a nap before the special show, she’s haunted by the spirit of her Aunt
Marla, who helped propel her into showbusiness and was a producer on the chat
show until she died – we’re never told how or why exactly that this happened.
Perhaps it was scenery-chewing and she choked on something; her warning that
the first spirit will arrive when the clock strikes 12 is so hammy that it
looks like a parody. Which may perhaps be what Grease star Dinah Manoff
was aiming for with the part, but I don’t think it’s what the film-makers
intended with the rest of it.
 |
| "What'chu talkin' about...?" |
Past:
Gary Coleman
arrives in Carol’s dressing room basically playing a version of himself, and
takes her back to her childhood, showing her Aunt Marla pushing her into the
lead role in a nativity play as a child even though it upset a
recently-bereaved child who was mean to be playing Mary. Marla is shown
throughout these visions as being controlling and manipulative, having
exploited Carol for her own ends.
We then skip
forward to Carol at drama college, where she meets John, a man who looks twice
her age and runs a homeless shelter. We’d seen in the opening section how this
drip of a Belle had won a ‘Good Guy of the Year’ award, and we now get a soppy
montage which again veers well into unintentional self-parody to show his and
Carol’s love for one another.
Carol becomes the
star of a series called The Tillys of Bel Air, which is presumably
intended to be a parody of Spelling’s 90210 role. We suffer through
dialogue such as “are you so cruel that you’d make her choose between us?” as
Marla splits her and John up, and there are lashings of the Nutcracker
on the soundtrack.
Marla dies, after
having signed up Carol for a chat show which the visions reveal producer Hal
wants to basically turn into a Jerry Springer-style freak show.
 |
| "Beam me up, Christmas!" |
Present:
There is one joke
I quite liked in this section, with the original Spirit’s “touch my robe”
having been translated into Carol having to touch his braces whenever they are
transported somewhere because he doesn’t want to take her hand due to a fear of
germs. Speaking of transportation, there is a Star Trek reference with
the way in which the Spirit – who has taken the form of ‘Dr Bob’, a personality
on a rival TV show – takes Carol from place-to-place, with a Trek-style
transporter effect.
We see the poor
conditions in which Roberta and her daughter Lilly – who unlike Tim in the
original, isn’t ill – live, and Roberta’s burgeoning romance with Jimmy who
works on the show. All this looks set to be ruined by Lilly’s father, Frank,
who wants to take custody of her. We also visit Carol’s sister and her family, with
a truly sickeningly scripted pair of the most unnaturalistic children you have
ever seen on screen in your life.
This section
establishes that A Christmas Carol exists in this universe – although in
that odd way Americans sometimes do, they refer to it as The
Christmas Carol – with Beth’s family reading it together as is evidently a
Christmas Eve tradition for them. Carol herself, however, doesn’t seem to be
familiar with the story, or at least she never comments on the similarity of
what’s happening to her to it.
Yet to Come:
James Cromwell is
probably the best of the three spirits – a silent, imposing, deathly-looking
chauffeur driving a black stretched limo. There’s a decent little joke where
Carol tries to engage him in conversation, asking him whether he prefers to be
addressed as ‘ghost’ or ‘spirit’, and what the different implications of the
two terms might be.
There’s an oddity
in that we’re shown the future Carol presenting the full-on ‘freakshow’ version
of her chat show, with the day’s topic being ‘I Hate My Family’, and then
quitting because she doesn’t think it’s right – which presumably shows she has
some morals without the ghosts visiting her anyway. It rather lessens the
effect of the story, but perhaps for a piece of Christmas froth they didn’t
want her seeming too unlikeable.
We’re then shown
further in her future, where as a grey-haired old lady she’s doing
sparsely-attended personal appearances at a retirement village. We then see her
even more sparsely-attended funeral – only Roberta and Jimmy are there, both
not looking anywhere near as aged-up as Spelling just was in the previous
scene. Roberta reveals that after she lost custody of Lilly, the two of them
rarely speak any more.
The end of this
section sees the most amount of dialogue from the book – apart from when the
beginning was being read in the ‘present’ sequence – as Carol has the lines
about whether these are things that may be or will be, and asking why they’d
bother showing her these things if she were beyond all hope.
 |
| "What the hell am I doing here? I was nominated for an Oscar once, you know!" |
What’s To-Day:
Carol awakes,
it’s still Christmas Eve, and she hasn’t missed it. This part goes on for
rather longer than it does in other versions, as we see her make amends with
Roberta and Jimmy and the rest of the team, and even promise them all a free
trip to Hawaii.
It all gets a bit
over-the-top and sugary really, especially when she then goes to her sister’s
house. Her old flame John turns up, and they all end up reading A Christmas
Carol on the sofa together while the three ghosts look on appreciatively
through the window, lined up as if they’re the Force Ghosts looking at Luke at
the end of Return of the Jedi. Although of course it’s not unheard-of for
the spirits to pop up at the end like this in some other versions.
Review:
This really is
very poor indeed. If you were being charitable you might say that it was
deliberately intended to be a parody of ‘modern TV movie version of A
Christmas Carol’, but it slips so haphazardly into and out of that tone,
and is never done with a nod and a wink to the audience, that I really do think
the writing and direction simply is that bad.
You might say,
‘well what do you expect from a lightweight TV movie?’ But having only a few
days ago watched A Diva’s Christmas Carol from three years earlier, it’s
quite clear that you can make exactly the same type of film with a lot more
skill and style than this.
It’s a shame
really, as it seems a waste of several talented actors who could have been put
to much better use.
In a nutshell:
Even just taking
it for what it is, a very poor effort. There are much better contemporary-set
US TV movie versions of the story with female leads than this.
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