So let’s start off with a bang, and talk about this 2019 BBC/FX miniseries starring Guy Pearce! (CW: urine, sexual harassment, sexual assault, child sexual assault, and cruelty to animals, unfortunately)
(But okay, look, I genuinely cracked up at this GET OFF MY LAWN scene)
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It starts with a cursing child pissing on Jacob Marley’s grave, and no matter how tedious and unnecessary it is to string this story out to 3+ grimdark hours, you have to admit, it’s a very strong cold open?
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I have to say, I did not expect a supernatural, solo origin story for Marley, extrapolated from half a dozen lines of dialogue, but this version really fills out his torments in purgatory and so on, before being reluctantly assigned to go reform Scrooge - as well as raising the stakes, straight off the bat, to say that Scrooge and Marley have a body count of workers who died in their hellish factories. Even weirder, we end up following Marley kicking around figuring out just how the fuck this Christmas Ghost job works.
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The most persistent theme about this version is that subtext is for cowards; everyone's just bluntly stating their motivation. Fred prefaces "Merry Christmas, Uncle" with "I'll say this because I know it hurts you," and Scrooge explains to Bob Cratchit that he doesn't care about being hated. Scrooge also, in methodically plucking coal from the scuttle to allow Bob heat for the day, gets a scuff on his sleeve, and immediately attributes it to “the kindness” of rationing one extra lump (four, rather than three!!) because it’s extra-cold.
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These are also the most fucking passive-aggressive Scrooge-Bob conversations ever, they’re both just openly sneering and sniping at one another; no stolid good-natured deference to be found on the employee side of labour relations here, Bob is maaaaad. (Also, know who else just really goddamn loathes Scrooge’s guts? Marley, who describes him as “94% gravel.” And his abusive dad, for that matter, who beats him with a poker, and killed his pet mouse to teach him the lesson never to love anything.)
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Or, for instance, why not include in your adaptation a cockney-accented worker explaining in great detail why the Scrooge and Marley-owned factory afire in a flashback is his fault? (Which is not to say only “Of course it is,” but to go over the history of gas leaks and the expense of digging up pipes.)
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Consider also: an extended flashback scene of Mrs. Cratchit secretly begging Scrooge for a loan for two-year-old Tiny Tim’s life-saving surgery, whereupon Scrooge dangles the £30 over her as instead a gift, if she’ll humiliate herself in a way that proves his misanthropy is scientifically justified. Yes, this Scrooge is a sex creep!
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So Scrooge makes her strip before saying he’s not interested; he just wanted to prove she’d do it…and then hands over the money, with a withering “Merry Christmas,” and a threat that he’ll tell Bob if she ever lets him quit. To make this extra-painful, she’s been lying to the children for years that the money came from a rich American cousin, whom Tim insists on writing a letter every Christmas. To make this extra-extra-painful, Bob is going to tell Scrooge off and quit, tomorrow, on Boxing Day - right after Mary has made up a different lie about the source of the money - because one of Scrooge's competitors made him a better offer.
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Anyway let’s have a brief respite from sexual cruelty: I read Scrooge as neurodivergent-coded here, and it's...hmmmm. He does things like count the rotations of wheels and number of hoofsteps going by his office window to enter into a special ledger, in order to send a noise complaint to the city; he’s obsessively fastidious in an OCD-like way about getting his hands dirty; he habitually has lengthy conversations with the absent Marley.
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And how about “You know, it makes me very sad to see all the lies, that come as surely as the snow, this time of year. How many Merry Christmases are meant, and how many are lies?” Holy fuck Ebenezer, make sure you don’t cut yourself on that edge, dude. Scrooge is also the kind of aggressively smug atheist who uses it as a general vehicle for being a superior asshole, so he’s got that edge going for him too.
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Christmas Past is, initially, wild-eyed, haggard Andy Serkis, who threatens he’ll “take hot tweezers to your soul and remove the splinters;” for thinly-justified reasons, he changes his form to Ali Baba, per the imagination of Young Scrooge (YS, henceforth) on reading the Arabian Nights, who is played by What We Do In The Shadows’ Kayvan Novak.
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Further, there’s a gross little subplot about how YS is being sexually abused by his boarding school headmaster - hey, guess what, that was his bastard dad’s way to get free tuition, and thereby not have to have YS in the house for years - to the point where his sister has to threaten the man with a derringer to get him out of the building.
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Unlike the usual jolly green-robed giant of the text and most adaptations, Christmas Present is, instead, Scrooge’s dead sister who engages him in philosophical jousting over reason vs. emotion. And I have to say: it’s a little weird!
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By the time of the Christmas Future visions, Scrooge is surprisingly accepting of responsibility for his own specific awfulness? And then, he just textually admits to Marley that he has an infinite capacity for justifying his selfishness with pseudo-scientific rationalization?
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Also, the Spirit of Christmas Future is just a cenobite with a sewed-up mouth.
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Anyway, Scrooge’s very first good deed ever is to ruin the skating rink, so that Tiny Tim can’t fall through the ice and drown in the future; his second, is to visit the Cratchits and explain his whole mystical journey in detail and infodump how he intends to apologize for his cruelty (because, again, subtlety is for cowards).
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This version gets points, certainly, for Scrooge accepting that he isn’t forgiven and can never be (especially and pointedly for what he did to Mrs. Cratchit!), and conceding everyone is better off if he gives Bob a generous severance, shuts down his business, and never fucking interacts with the Cratchits again.
FINAL RATING: 7/10. Unnecessarily edgy and overlong, but a very interestingly modern conclusion about what redemption actually looks like, once you’ve spent a long time intentionally harming others out of cynically cruel libertarian smugness. If Elon Musk were haunted by three spirits on Christmas Eve, it’d look a lot like this?