A CHRISTMAS CAROL (2000)

It wouldn't seem like we need any more film or TV versions of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"—Wikipedia lists almost 100 from the silent era to now, including sitcom, animated and drama show versions (Bewitched, Family Guy, Mr. Magoo) and loose adaptations (Ebbie, An American Christmas Carol). But there are least three reasons why we'll keep getting them: 1) people watch them; 2) writers and actors of each generation want a shot at doing their own versions; 3) it's interesting to see the variations that get worked on the basic outline and details of the original story. There are certain characters and story beats that always remain: Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim, three ghosts, a movement toward empathy and charity. It's what changes that can make a new version fun or relevant.

In this version, made for British TV, Eddie Scrooge is a low-life loan shark who, with his assistant Bob Cratchit, goes about on Christmas Eve making life miserable for some of his clients. At the apartment of a single mom with three kids who is behind in her payments, Eddie takes her TV set and gleefully throws it off a balcony. He pesters an elderly couple, brushes aside charity requests, and ignores the mother of his former partner Jacob Marley who was murdered a year ago under mysterious circumstances that Eddie may know something about. As usual, Eddie rebuffs his nephew Dave's yearly request for Eddie to join him and his wife for Christmas dinner. The only somewhat tender side we see of Eddie is the regret he feels for letting his girlfriend Bella get away; when he refused to leave his thuggish life behind, she turned down his marriage proposal. That night, in his high security apartment in a rough inner-city neighborhood, the late Jacob Marley shows up on his mission of reform, with the promise of three ghosts who will help. The first major difference in the structure of Dickens' story is that Marley himself becomes the Ghost of Christmas Present; Past is Eddie's dad, and Future is a child who is... well, that would be a spoiler. The second major difference is that after the visits of each ghost, Eddie wakes up on Christmas Eve all over again, and ventures out in mostly half-hearted attempts to change his behavior. It isn't until Future's visit that Eddie has a sincere desire to change.

The cast is composed almost completely of actors I'm not familiar with. The shaved-headed Eddie is Ross Kemp, known in England for his iconic tough-guy role in the soap opera East Enders (pictured with the three ghosts at top right). He was generally good, though his final transformation scenes aren't as fizzy or giddy as tradition would dictate. The only actor I knew was Liz Smith (the dotty old lady in The Vicar of Dibley) who played the elderly woman, but I was impressed by Ray Fearon as Marley and Daniel Ainsleigh as Dave (pictured above). The best metamorphosis was turning the symbolic children of Want and Ignorance into real teens who are homeless and near death from pneumonia. I was a little confused by some of the details of the Bob Cratchit/Tiny Tom storyline, and there's one character (Eric, maybe) who pops up quite a bit but didn't have a Dickens parallel that I could discern. The look of the movie is drab and colorless, but it's worth checking out if you can find it—I saw it on This TV, one of those free cable channels that mostly shows reruns and movies. My only warning: the British accents can get a bit heavy, and subtitles were not an option.