A Christmas Carol - 2020, film

Title:
A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Live action feature film
 
Country:
UK
 
Production company:
Frith Street Films
 
Year:
2020
 
Length:
96 minutes
 
Setting:
Fantasy Victorian
 
Background:
This is, I feel reasonably certain of saying, a unique version of the Carol. There is a framing set-up at the start and end which is conventionally acted and performed, of some children putting on a kind of puppet show version of the Carol with cut-out paper figures from newspapers and illustrations, for an audience of presumably their mother and father and a younger sibling. An older woman, perhaps their grandmother, narrates.
 
But the main action of the story and the majority of the film takes place ‘within’ their model theatre stage. Live-action performances among dioramas of cut-out newspaper clippings and Leech-like illustrations and cardboard walls. And these live-action performers do not speak any words – they glide and move but all the vocal performances are given by others, mixed with the narration. The whole effect is rather like watching a narrated ballet with voiceovers for the different characters, or visuals put to a radio play.

 

This did, apparently, get a cinema release in the UK for Christmas 2020, and I think I do remember toying with the idea of going to see it. But cinemas were of course struggling in the pandemic at the time, with big releases having been pushed back to 2021, social distancing in place and not many people yet keen to get fully back into the swing of going out and gathering together. So I doubt this did much business or was seen by a huge number of people on its original release.
 
Cast and crew:
Each of the characters, outside of the framing set-up, has two performers – a dancer and a voice artist. So, for example, Scrooge is seen being performed on-screen as a dancer by Michael Nunn, but all of his dialogue is delivered by Simon Russell Beale, as Nunn’s lips never move to it, nor do any of the other characters to their voice actors – this is not a mime show.
 
The voice cast is, I think, much better known than the dancing one. Beale is one of those actors distinguished in the profession – knighted, even – with a wide and respected body of work but not really a household name as such; more of a kind of ‘oh, him!’ type when you see him in things. I recall him mostly as Widmerpool in the Channel 4 version of A Dance to the Music of Time, for which he won a BAFTA.
 
Elsewhere, Bob Cratchit is voiced by Martin Freeman, known of course for his TV roles as Tim in the original BBC version of The Office and Watson in Sherlock, and on the big screen for his starring role in the Peter Jackson Hobbit films. Oscar-winner Daniel Kaluuya voices the Ghost of Christmas Present, while two-time Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan gets quite a high billing for quite a small part as Belle. Andy Serkis, a year on from his appearance in the 2019 television version, gets a credit on a more traditional telling here, this time in the role of the voice of Marley. The biggest name actually appearing on screen is Siân Phillips, as the narrating grandmother figure in the wraparound sequences, and in voiceover form throughout.

The film is directed by Northampton-born brother-and-sister team Jacqui and David Morris, with David providing the screenplay. They began their filmmaking career on documentaries, being BAFTA nominated for their production about war photographer Don McCullin. Together they run Frith Street Films, which was the production company for this version of the Carol.

 
Underdone Potato:
Having Phillips as the narrator means that, much like Gonzo in the Muppet version, we get to keep much of Dickens’ prose from the book which would otherwise have been lost in a more conventional screen adaptation, so that’s a good move. However, there is one change near the very start which gives me pause. The underlining that it must be understood that Marley is dead at the start “…or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate,” is here changed to “nothing good,” which I’d suggest is a rather different thing.
 
It's an interesting change because it seems to me to switch the meaning of the line from being that you have to understand Marley is dead or else the story itself will not have its wondrous magic, to meaning you cannot take the good and decent message of the story unless you understand that. It is, as I say, an interesting thing to do and I wish I could ask David Morris why he’d decided to make that particular change.

 

Marley is quite a sinister figure here, so much so that there’s even a bit of a coded warning about this at the start, with the mother warning her youngest child that Marley will be the frightening one, but will be soon gone. One of his lines which is often left out, the explicitly Christian reference to the Wise Men following a star, is included here – and overall this version does retain more of Dickens’ specific references to Christianity than is usually the case in other adaptations of what’s become the great secular Christmas tale.
 
There are some minor changes, such as Scrooge meeting the two charitable gentlemen out on the street rather than in his office, but on the whole, as with the rest of the film, this section proceeds fairly faithfully to the book.
 
Past:
The spirit is female on this occasion, and seems to lack any of the candle imagery specified by Dickens – although I suppose you could say that her dance performance is perhaps intended to evoke the flickering of a flame. It’s fairly subtle though, if so, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course.
 
The school scene contains one of the few of this versions own inventions, a man called “Honest Tom” who is seen to comfort the young Scrooge during one of his lonely childhood Christmases. We get Fan bringing him home, and then later an extra Fan scene between the Fezziwig party and the Belle scenes – Fan dying in childbirth with Fred, which I suppose could perhaps be taken as implied in the book but isn’t explicit.

As in many other versions Belle is present at the Fezziwigs’ party, which she isn’t in the book, and we see Scrooge propose to her there. After the late scene of her breaking their engagement, here we do get the second Belle scene from the Christmas of Marley’s death, which any adaptation always gets an extra mark from me for including as I have always liked it. However, they don’t do the entire scene – we see her husband return home, but there’s none of their discussion of Scrooge and Marley which takes place in the book.
 
With the spirit lacking that candle imagery, here Scrooge does not snuff her out at the end of the section.
  
Present:
Most of the usual main elements are all present and correct here, but as in other places they also include some things which other adaptations often omit. So we have Scrooge’s confrontation with the spirit over the pressure to close bakeries on Sundays, and a little of their trip out to sea – although no miners.
 

Just before the end of the section, there is another of the inventions unique to this version, as we see examples of violence, aggression and prostitution on the streets of Victorian London. These are seemingly there to underline the issues of Ignorance and Want, as unveiled from beneath the spirit’s cloak as in the original.
 
Yet-to-Come:
The spirit has something of its usual hooded shape, but taking a cue from Dickens’s description of it “coming like a mist along the ground,” it’s depicted here not so much as a person as a kind of black cloud with a single hand emerging from it to point and gesture as-and-when required.

What’s To-Day:

Again, very faithful to the book – although there is one oddity which I don’t quite understand. When Scrooge asks the boy below his window to go and buy the prize bird from the poulterers’ for him, Dickens has the boy reply with a disbelieving “Walk-er!” This no longer being a common expression it’s not usually included in adaptations, although it is sometimes by those who like the period flavour it gives or just want to try and be as authentic to the text as they can.
 
Here the boy replies… “Walk-RE”. Which I don’t understand. It almost makes me wonder… Was it a typing error? A transposing of the last two letters of the response which somehow made it all the way through scripting, redrafting, recording, editing and dubbing…? It couldn’t be… Could it…?

Review:

It’s hard not to imagine a lot of the people who might actually have ventured to the cinema to see this turning to someone who’d come to it with them a little way in and asking, in trepidation, “Is it… like this all the way through?”
 
Sadly, yes it is. I didn’t hate this version by any stretch of the imagination, and I think that the design and concept of the staging of it, the whole idea of the characters being cut-outs within the dollhouse theatre setting, is lovely. And having Phillips as narrator to give us some of that wonderful Dickens prose is always something which I’d welcome.
 
But I suspect you’d probably get a lot more out of this version of you’re interested in interpretive dance – which I am not. I think you need words to tell a story, and while of course narration and dialogue are both present here, I find the way they’re detached from the characters on screen gives a distancing effect to the whole thing.

In a nutshell:
There are far worse versions, and it is an interesting experiment. It looks lovely – but I find it hard to believe it could ever be anybody’s favourite version of the Carol.

Links:

Frith Street Films

Wikipedia

IMDb