Johnny Depp seeks redemption

Charles Dickens wrote in the preface of A Christmas Carol (1843) that with his ghostly little book he wanted to evoke an idea without displeasing anyone, namely: that redemption and change are always possible. The story is well-known: on the night of December 24th, the miserly and grumpy Ebenezer Scrooge receives a visit from the specter of his late partner, Marley, who announces the dangers of his behavior and the arrival of three spirits. From early cinema (Marley’s ghost, 1901) to Robert Zemeckis’s digital animation (A Christmas Carol, 2009) passing through Richard Donner’s comedy Scrooged (1988) or the Muppets’ musical (Brian Henson, 1992), Scrooge has lived in many films. The version that Ti West now presents is a faithful adaptation of Dickens’s text, a classic that maintains the era, the dialogues, and even the stanza structure of the original.

There are, however, two contributions that make it especially interesting: one is the choice of Johnny Depp as the protagonist, an actor rejected and condemned by public judgment who could be seeking absolution with his Scrooge, and the other is the genre cinema framework. Ti West seems to adapt Dickens with his gaze fixed on Edgar Allan Poe –hence the gothic imagery and the raven that presides over the story–, as if remembering that, unlike the miracle of It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946), the change in Scrooge is not motivated by good deeds, but by the fear of punishment.