A Christmas Carol - 2019, film

Title:
A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Digitally-released feature film for online streaming
 
Country:
Ireland
 
Production company:
Sallybrook Productions Limited
 
Year:
2019 (premiered at Fermoy in Ireland in December, although released online in 2020)
 
Length:
77 minutes
 
Setting:
London, 1795 (for no apparent reason, and despite everyone having Irish accents)
 
Background:
Only a couple of days ago we had the blog’s very first Irish adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and here we have the second. This has a number of similarities with that 2012 version, aside from its country of origin – it’s a low-budget feature designed for online release, now available through the Amazon Prime streaming service, and it seems to have been very much the brainchild of a single driving force behind the scenes.
 
There may also have been some UK funding involved somewhere along the way, however, with the film being listed on the British Council’s website, with the production company having an address in Wolverhampton. Certainly there was English involvement from students at De Montfort University in Leicester, who created the computer-generated street scenes and other CGI elements present through the film.

I wouldn't be that proud of it if I were you...

Cast and crew:
Director Girish Patel is a teacher by trade, at a school in Fermoy in Cork, where the film had its world premiere at the Fermoy Youth Centre, having also been entirely shot at various locations around Cork. Also a musician, Patel provided the music as well as also writing the screenplay and being co-credited as editor and production designer, too – the latter two alongside producer Carmel Barrett, also a Cork native.
 
Patel and Barrett also both appear in the production, perhaps showing the rather limited pool they had to cast from. Barrett has an odd role as a nun who’s a combination of other characters from the original story, while Patel is credited as the Ghost of Christmas Present. I say credited because I’m pretty sure he also has another role as Marley’s ghost, although that part isn’t listed on the closing credits.

John Brett - possibly the very worst 'actor' in all of Ireland

 
The rest of the all-Irish cast is led by John Brett, Patrick Murphy and Niamh Murphy, about any of whom it’s difficult to find out a great deal. Niamh Murphy does appear to have done a fair bit of stage work in Ireland, however, and has appeared in other short and low-budget films – she’s also by some margin the best performer in this, as the Ghost of Christmas Past, although I have to admit that’s not saying much.
 
Underdone Potato:
The film begins with a black-and-white scene, which a caption tells us is set in London, 1795. I therefore assumed – and spent a large chunk of the film assuming – that this was some sort of prologue, designed to show us some incident in Scrooge’s early life which led to his later temperament, and that the Scrooge and Marley sign seen was perhaps meant to suggest that their fathers had also been in business together. But no – it’s later revealed that this is simply when the film is set. The young boy playing a recorder who I thought was the young Scrooge actually turns out to be a substitute for the book’s young carol singer outside Scrooge’s office.

"Funny thing is, my father was a nun..."

There’s a bit of opening narration, although not taken from the book, and given in this instance by Bob Cratchit. Once we’re into Scrooge’s counting-house, the pattern is set for the film whereby pretty much everything is shot in a sequence of very tight close-ups – presumably to save on having to construct too much of a set behind each character.
 
Producer Carmel Barrett turns up as a nun who is a combination of both Fred and the two charitable gentlemen from the book, having a combination of both their conversations with Scrooge – although Fred’s lines about having got married because he fell in love are changed to the nun having taken her calling because she fell in love with Jesus Christ.
 
‘Jesus Christ’ were certainly among the words going through my mind while I was watching this, I can tell you…

No, it turns out that Lucy isn't the dog...

 
We follow Bob home, where we learn that instead of a plethora of Cratchit children, there is just one – ‘Little Lucy’, who takes the place of Tiny Tim in this version. Although Bob’s journey home is so appallingly directed that you can be forgiven for making the mistake of thinking that ‘Little Lucy’ is actually the name of the family’s pet dog.

 
Back in his rooms, Scrooge begins to experience Marley’s haunting presence – without the usual doorknocker which kicks things off. Instead, in this instance it’s replaced by… a novelty teapot. I suppose you have to hand it to them for making use of what was available to them, although why Scrooge had such a thing in his bedroom is, unsurprisingly, not delved into.

Even the novelty teapot is horrified at the idea of being in this film

 
Marley himself only appears in extreme close up, seemingly holding some very small chains across his face, just to make sure that he seems suitably ridiculous.

Past:
The Ghost of Christmas Past is a young woman in this version, played by Niamh Murphy – who is not only by far and away the best actor in this thing, she’s possibly the only person with any lines in it who can actually act at all.

Poor Niamh. You're better than this!

 
The only vision of the past Scrooge is given is a variation of the school scene, and his visit from Fan. Scrooge’s father is made out to be a much harder and more abusive character by the dialogue in this version. That’s not unusual, but what is unusual is Scrooge actually refusing to leave to go home with Fan. Instead he sends her away, before pulling out a recorder – ‘Aha!’ thought I, ‘this is where the callback to the prologue comes in…’ But no, it’s then explained that this just makes the old Scrooge think of the young recorder player outside his office earlier.
 
Then the whole thing really goes off the rails as the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge… A vision of the future. And not even his future. For reasons which pass understanding, here is inserted a very slow short film about a boy who needs a heart transplant – for yes, this is a hospital in London some 200-odd years in Scrooge’s future. It’s supposedly there to teach Scrooge a lesson about being grateful for what he has, but is clearly only here because it’s a short film Patel had either already made or wanted to make, and this was his Trojan Horse for getting it out there.

No. I have absolutely no idea, either

 
I mean, it literally has no connection to anything that is going on. It’s as if something’s gone wrong with the streaming service and it’s started randomly showing you another film partway through. It’s shot very weirdly, too, with only music, a bit of voiceover and intertitles like a silent film. Scrooge, rather than boggling at this far-off future world of the 21^st century – or railing at how crap this all is – solemnly seems to understand its message.
 
Present:
Ye Gads, what can I say about the Ghost of Christmas Present? It’s… It’s… Well, it’s director Girish Patel in yet another extreme close-up, with a Father Christmas hat and a very cheap-looking false white beard. That’s literally it.

There’s only one vision shown, but at least we don’t have to put up with a random short film this time. We see Bob’s house, with his mute wife and Little Lucy. Patrick Murphy as Bob is clearly the only performer of a member of the Cratchit family who can actually be trusted to speak.
 
There is a line about the Spirit having seemed to age, but no discernible ageing has taken place with the character whatsoever. In what’s probably the best bit of direction – maybe the only really competent bit – in the entire film, Patel does make a half-decent stab at Ignorance and Want, but frankly this far into the film you’re probably quite willing to ignore the Spirit’s warning and allow mankind to head to its doom.
 
Yet to Come:
In a graveyard, Scrooge is confronted by a Spirit wearing what looks more like a rain mac than a cloak, but at least looks broadly right. It’s probably hard to go too far wrong with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

Scrooge sees a body being put under a shroud, with hair which gives away the fact that the body looks nothing like him, and yet is clearly supposed to be him. We also go to the Cratchits’, where Bob is mourning the death of Little Lucy – but then declares that hey, it’s Christmas, so they’d better cheer up, right?
 
“I see my name upon the grave!” declares Scrooge, surprisingly convinced by what appears to be a close-up of a mocked-up gravestone on a piece of paper. All of this attempt at Dickens, however, is merely the build-up to another lesson of a vision for Scrooge. Yes, it’s another completely unrelated short film, this time about a nun – another nun! – in Pennsylvania in 1915. Basically, it’s a long-winded tale designed to teach us, and Scrooge, that ‘everything happens for a reason’, but is clearly just another flimsy excuse for Patel to shove in a completely unrelated short film idea.

What’s To-Day:
There’s no boy below the window in this version. He seems to have been replaced by… um… A robin. Which Scrooge looks at and instantly deduces it’s Christmas Day, before talking to himself about sending a turkey to the Cratchits.

It's no surprise that one of the best shots in the film is a piece of stock footage

He bumps into the nun from earlier, and offers he a charitable donation in the form of a wadge of notes. There’s no Fred in this, so of course nobody for him to go and visit for Christmas dinner, so instead we cut to the usual Boxing Day ending of him playing his little trick on Bob. Still, at least Smoking Bishop retains its namecheck here, which it doesn’t usually.
 
As has been done elsewhere – in the 2009 Disney version, for example – it’s Bob who delivers the closing narration. This makes sense given that as mentioned there’s no Fred, who is more often the choice for that in screen adaptations where such a thing is present.
 
Review:
It seems I was far too hasty in declaring the 2019 BBC version as the worst ever adaptation of the Carol. Just over a week after I posted that review, this has come along and taken its crown.
 
I mean, where do I start…?
 
It is bad on every conceivable level. Performance-wise, with the honourable exception of Niamh Murphy and perhaps Mary Anne Brassil who takes the lead in the second random short film, it’s abysmal. It’s not simply that these people are bad actors. It’s that most of them barely seem to be acting at all. John Brett as Scrooge goes through the whole thing as if reading all of his lines off large cue-cards just out of shot – which, for all I know, he may well have been.
 
It’s bad structurally. I mean, I’ll repeat it if it seems unbelievable – two, completely unrelated short films set in times and / or places completely removed from the story, with utterly unrelated characters, are shoe-horned in on the very flimsiest of pretexts. Both made almost as if they’re silent films, too. It’s just weird.
 
The writing is bad. Where Patel adapts Dickens lines, he sometimes doesn’t seem to actually understand what they mean, and it can be almost as if he shortened some to save time or space without considering the effect it would have. For example, the line in the closing passage from the book about Scrooge becoming as a good a friend, “…as the good old city knew,” is rendered here as, “as good a friend as the good old city.”
 
You what…? Friends with lots of cities, are you, Girish…?
 
The direction is awful. There is no shame in having to do close-ups to avoid showing too much of what is or isn’t in the background. But there is some really appalling random cutting between shots, and some deeply confusing choices that leave you bemused as to what’s going on – such as the prologue that isn’t a prologue, and Bob’s walk home accompanied by shots of the family’s pet dog as he talks about Lucy.

Another example of the shockingly poor direction and lack of
attention to detail. So Scrooge got up at half past four, did he? When
it would be dark morning or afternoon in December? And why's the clock
ringing if it's not on a quarter-hour...?

 
The production is poor. For almost anything that isn’t a close-up we get CGI shots of streets and even the other side of a room, and while I’m sure the De Montfort students did their best, it all looks very cheap. Indeed, at times the move from low-rent CGI into appalling performances leaves the whole thing feeling bit like a series of overlong scenes from a computer game.
 
There are all sorts of random odd decisions or just general examples of poor technique, too. What looks like an editing software programme’s ‘snow’ effect being laid across outdoor scenes. Appalling transitions such as cuts to black which will make you wonder whether your TV is on the blink. It doesn’t even seem to be rendered properly – I tried it on different browsers which were displaying other videos properly, and every time the film had a stuttering, dropped-field sort of effect which I found very off-putting. The sound is often very poor too, with random changes in volume and effects on voices coming and going.
 
The music is also pretty dreadful. Much of the score consists of versions of presumably mostly handily-out-of-copyright Christmas carols, all sounding as if they’re being played on the tinniest, squeakiest Casio keyboard possible.
 
I was quite hard on the 2012 Irish version I reviewed earlier this month. But really, it’s light years ahead of this mess. This really is very, very bad indeed, and I implore you to think again very quickly if you are even slightly tempted to ever watch it.
 
In a nutshell:
Not just the new holder of the title of ‘worst version of the Carol I have yet seen’. It may well also be the worst film I have ever seen, full stop.
 
Links:
Amazon Prime (But really, don’t bother. It’s not worth it!)
IMDb

A Christmas Carol - 2012, film

Title:
A Christmas Carol (technically Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol on the title card, but just A Christmas Carol in all their publicity material I could find, so I have gone with the latter)
 
Format:
Digitally-released feature film for online streaming
 
Country:
Ireland
 
Production company:
October Eleven Pictures
 
Year:
2012 (released online on January 1^st 2012)
 
Length:
82 minutes
 
Setting:
Victorian London
 
Background:
There have been British, American, Canadian and Australian adaptations of A Christmas Carol reviewed on the blog – and now here’s the first Irish version to join the ranks. In fact, director Jason Figgis claimed this to be not simply the first Irish adaptation of A Christmas Carol, but the first Irish film version of any of Dickens’s works full stop. It was released online at one minute past midnight on the first of January 2012 – which looks at first glance to be an odd choice, just missing Christmas, but evidently Figgis was keen to publicise it as the very first adaptation of one of Dickens’s works to be released in the author’s bicentennial year.
 
The film took two years to make, and was allegedly made on a budget of just 1200 euros – with the cast and crew being promised a 25% share of any profits from online rentals of the film. Whether or not the film ever made much money seems doubtful, and the whole production company looks on the surface to be something of a vanity project for Figgis and his producer brother Johnny. However, at least they actually got this – and other films – made and out there in the world, which is more than can be said for many if not most other wannabe filmmakers.

Cast and crew:
As you’d expect from a low-budget Irish film, the majority of the cast and crew are from Ireland, led by Vincent Fegan as Scrooge. Fegan had by this point gained a variety of short film and minor television credits to his name, in common with most of the rest of the cast. There are some more experienced names in the credits, though – Bryan Murray as Marley was a regular in RTE’s soap opera Fair City, and had also appeared in well-known British shows such as The Bill and Casualty.
 
By far and away the most recognisable face, however, is Brendan O’Carroll, who turns up halfway through as Old Joe. O’Carroll was at this point already gaining success with his Mrs Brown character, so I can only imagine he must have owed someone involved a favour – or perhaps more charitably, wanted to support a home-grown Irish film effort. His fellow Irish comic Brendan Grace appears as the Ghost of Christmas Present – he’ll be known to many for a memorable guest turn in Father Ted as Father Fintan Stack, the unpleasant replacement for Father Jack in one episode.

Director, editor, scriptwriter and general driving force behind the whole thing Jason Figgis had initially worked as an animator in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, before forming October Eleven Pictures with his brother in the early 2000s. They made shorts, documentaries and eventually their own low-budget full-length films, of which A Christmas Carol was the third.
 
Underdone Potato:
Unusually for a modern film that isn’t a James Bond movie, this begins with a long opening titles sequence. You can see why Hollywood abandoned such things decades ago, but I suppose they wanted to put the credits for people who had given their time for very little or nothing front-and-centre where viewers would actually see them. This is all accompanied by a very imposing, mournful opening theme, which makes it sound more as if something like The Omen is about to start – it’s certainly not a Christmassy piece of music.

This is one of those versions where they decide to have Charles Dickens bookend the thing, and indeed as well as actually appearing at the start and end, his voiceover is heard throughout, reading passages of the text which are usually missing from most adaptations. It does have to be said, however, that this doesn’t always fit as well as it might do, working better at some points than at others. This even extends to including the Hamlet bit of the opening narration, complete with an actor playing Hamlet himself!
 
Mind you, Figgis does get bonus points from me for including all of Fred’s “other journeys” speech, which usually gets cut down to miss what is, for me, the best part. Curiously, the character of Fred is credited as “Frederick Scrooge”, which suggests that either Figgis wants to add some hint that Ebenezer’s disapproval of his nephew perhaps comes from his being born out of wedlock – although there’s no hint of this in the film itself – or else he’s simply misunderstood the nature of their familial relationship.
 
As well as Fred’s visit we have the two charitable gentlemen, and Scrooge’s usual exchanges with Bob, before he’s off back to his rooms and Marley comes calling. The ghostly effect of Marley is quite good, and might give a nice little jump scare to some on his first appearance, but you can’t really see any chains on him. Presumably why Figgis decides to try and compensate by overlaying the constant tinkling of what must be said are fairly puny-sounding chains.

Weirdly, although most of Marley’s dialogue is present, much of Scrooge’s is cut from their exchange. So Marley answers unasked questions, and for most of his visit it imparting a monologue rather than actually engaging in conversation with his former partner.
 
Past:
There’s an interesting technique used for the Ghost of Christmas Past – it has the face of a woman, but the lips never move and the voice is done off-screen by a man. There’s no suggestion of any of the candle-like qualities of the original, though.

The Ghost of Christmas Past... just hanging around!

 
As happens throughout all of the visitations Scrooge makes, he doesn’t interact with any of the scenes being shown. However, unlike in versions where the visions appear in his room and he simply watches them as if they were being projected on a screen, here it’s more the other way around. I’m guessing that Fegan was only available – or the only had the money for him – for a limited amount of time, so probably shot all his scenes in one block, and to allow for minimum interaction with the visions he watches them from off-screen, as if inside a window or a mirror of some sort with the spirit standing next to him. This does make sense for a low-budget film shot over a long period of time.
 
We see Scrooge’s school, with Fan coming to take him away, and we see the Fezziwigs’ party – although ‘party’ is a very generous description of it. Actually, it’s just Fezziwig telling Scrooge and Dick to shut up shop early because it’s Christmas Eve, and then the three of them sharing a drink. Presumably the budget couldn’t even run to a Mrs Fezziwig.

The Belle break-up scene is done pretty much in full and quite well, but we then have the second Belle scene, which comes across as a very bleak affair. Like the Fezziwig scene, it suffers from its sparseness – just as there was no time or money for partygoers at Fezziwig’s, presumably there was none for Belle’s bustling, happy household. Instead we just have her and her husband sitting by the fire, and whether intentionally or not it doesn’t exactly come across as a particularly happy marriage.
 
Present:
Brendan Grace as the Ghost of Christmas Present gives an enjoyable performance as the Spirit pretty much as described in the book – as far as budget allows, anyway. He’s also the first actor to be allowed to keep an Irish accent for the role, although lead actor Fegan does come-and-go a bit. Fegan’s no worse than George C. Scott in the much more storied 1984 version in terms of his English accent, mind.
 
Poor old Tiny Tim doesn’t get to speak at all, throughout the entire thing – presumably the boy either wasn’t good enough or couldn’t do an English accent well enough for it, so he’s mute. As with the previous section, what should be warm and cosy scenes are rendered rather cold and lifeless here. It probably doesn’t help that the Cratchits have an enormous kitchen, which doesn’t really square with the Spirit’s dialogue about the “poor corner” where the crutch without an owner will one day be kept.

Fred’s place is similarly glum – just he and his wife sitting alone by the window, in what really does come across as a miserable scene.
 
The Spirit doesn’t get any older through his time with Scrooge, although there is a very good stab at Ignorance and Want. The shot of the two children peeking out from under his cloak works well, and they do both look suitably pale and thin.
 
Yet to Come:
It could just be an effect of how it’s lit, but it seems as though the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come wears a red rather than a black robe in this version. As in many other versions, however, it does a lot of pointing – with a human-looking hand which has been made-up to look suitably disgusting by smearing it in something like Vaseline.

In a choice that doesn’t quite work for me, the people Scrooge sees discussing his death are the two charitable gentlemen – even though Scrooge has shunned their collection, it does feel a bit out-of-character for them to talk about him like this. It’s an especially odd choice as we then have two random businessmen who discuss Scrooge’s death in passing, casually dismissing it, in a scene hardly even done on-screen. Why not just use those two to shoot the more familiar “lunch provided” one, instead of making the charity collectors double-up?
 
We then get the Old Joe scene, with Brendan O’Carroll – who I’d had no idea was in this – taking me by surprise by turning up all of a sudden as Joe and being pretty much the best thing in it. Joe being Irish seems realistic for Victorian London, and the laundress keeps her Irish accent too, as well as being given an Irish name in Mrs Murphy, although Mrs Dilber is done as English.
 
The debtors who are relieved by Scrooge’s death are changed from being a young married couple to a family of four young women and girls. And after having been absent in the ‘Present’ section, when we go to the Cratchits to see them mourning Tiny Tim, Peter Cratchit is suddenly around, which might be a bit confusing for anyone who’s not familiar with the story.
 
We see Scrooge’s gravestone, and they even give him some dates – 1785 to 1854.
 
What’s To-Day:
There’s a weird shot shortly after Scrooge has awoken from his time with the Spirits where the sun streaming through the window obscures Fegan’s face to such a degree that it actually made me wonder if he had wrapped before they could get this shot in, and they were using  body-double instead. I don’t think that’s the case – it’s just a strange shot choice.
 
We have all the usual business with the boy, although the faithfulness to the original doesn’t extend as far as throwing a sarcastic, “Walk-er!” in there. Unfortunately, the problems with the sparseness of things continues, with Scrooge’s visit to Fred and his wife hardly looking like the merriest or jolliest of occasions.
 
We finish with Scrooge playing his little joke on Bob, as usual, and then Tim and Scrooge walking through what’s presumably meant to be Scrooge’s house, as ‘Charles Dickens’ delivers the final voiceover – including the concluding, ‘God bless us, every one!’, as poor old Tim still doesn’t get a line.

Review:

Possibly the two main attractions of A Christmas Carol for film-makers are also two of the biggest difficulties in getting your version noticed. Namely, it’s an incredibly well-known and popular story, which is also out-of-copyright and therefore freely available for anyone’s use. While this means you have a ready source of a strong, much-loved story for your film, it also means that there are a very large number of other versions competing for attention, so it’s going to take something special to get yourself widely seen.
 
Sadly for all those involved, this version lacks any sort of special quality which might set it out as unique and worthy of attention. While I can easily understand wanting to adapt the Carol, for the above-mentioned reasons, I can’t help but wonder if you’d be better off simply coming up with your own story. Or perhaps, if you wanted to try and adapt Dickens, perhaps having a go at one of the other Christmas books?
 
It might even have worked better if they’d gone all-out and done an actual Irish-set rather than simply Irish-made version of the tale, which would certainly have been a new interpretation. While most of the cast do a decent job with their English accents – certainly a much better job than an equivalent cast of English actors might do with a film set in 19^th century Ireland – I wonder whether it’s no coincidence that perhaps the two best performances in the whole thing, from Brendans Grace and O’Carroll, were from two of the only three actors who were allowed to keep Irish accents for the parts…?

An issue with setting it in London is that the locations never convince. Because they’re trying to avoid anything anachronistic, the whole thing has a very rural air to it, and a complete lack of any extras or even the suggestion of any crowd noise in the streets lends the whole thing a very empty, spartan air. It’s a cold, bleak version of the Carol, even at the moments when it’s trying to convey the cheer of the story.
 
Unsurprisingly, it does also look very cheap, with some shots having an almost camcorder feel to them. There are some nice-looking bits here and there – the arty opening titles shots as seen in the grab at the top of this page, for example – but on the whole the low-budget nature of the thing really is felt throughout. Some of the direction is also quite poor – towards the start there are some confusingly-edited random flash-forward shots to some of the visions Scrooge will be seeing later, and there are also some ponderously-long sequences without dialogue which could have done with being trimmed down.
 
Speaking of trimming down, while I applaud Figgis for including a lot of the text, with some portions which are rarely seen or heard on-screen, if anything the film suffers from being too faithful to the original. Some of the Dickensian narration goes on for too long to comfortably fit in, and the same goes for some of he dialogue sequences too. While he does include some of my favourite lines which I often miss from other versions, it’s a lesson that sometimes over-fidelity to the original can be a weakness. This is simply a different medium, and you have to make allowances and compromises for that.
 
In a nutshell:
Well done to them for doing it and for getting it made. But this is very much one for the completists only.
 
Links:
Amazon Prime
IMDb