A CHRISTMAS CAROL

A CHRISTMAS CAROL: A Brief Review

A December 2019 BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Christmas tale about Ebenezer Scrooge.

Stuart McKinlay: We watched A Christmas Carol with Guy Pearce. It is a powerful evocation of Scrooge's wounding horrors as a child, careless brutality as an adult, a raw and shockingly frank psychological post-mortem of a damned soul teetering on the edge of Hell, and then... what? Magnificent acting from everyone, the ghosts real, the spirits physical, and supernaturally omniscient. It would scare the Dickens out of Dickens.

Neil McKinlay: A Christmas Carol (starring Guy Pearce) is like David Hume meets Charles Dickens. Pearce is excellent as Scrooge, reminding the viewer of one of those “having their conscience seared with a hot iron” (1Tim. 4:2), where his Hume-esque (Hume-anist) philosophical approach to human behaviour is empiricist, sceptic, and naturalistic, that is, until he meets some of his incarnated memories. Solid spirits who leave no footprints in the snow! Snowflakes abound as one would expect with Dickens at Christmas.

There is no background score as such, but what musical intonations there are, cellos and select and suitable piano notes et al, helps set the sombre mood of most of the movie, as do the almost subliminal moaning wind sounds.  

There are a lot of psychological demons creeping around and manifesting themselves from the mists, (reminiscent of the copious amounts of dry ice used in ye olde Hammer Films of Dracula and Frankenstein fame).

Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” are conjured up with Scrooge’s abuse of human labour. His totally unchristian profit over people mentality exemplifies his cauterised conscience. The spirits are trying to help enable him to discover his heart. His view of humanity as corrupted was formed at boarding school by a sexual deviant schoolmaster he had to spend summer and winter breaks with on account of his abusive father always making excuses why he couldn’t come home.

Scrooge moralistically views all of mankind as either already corrupted or easily corruptible. Money being the corrupting influence. He gains his sought-after empirical evidence of this through human experiment. The movie is more about Hume’s subjective Morality than Dickens’s Christianity.

The graphics are excellent, and the costumes and scenery enhance the tale of Scrooge’s intense course of deep psychotherapy. Part of our angst as humans is that we would like to, but cannot, revisit our past to fix things after we have realised the mess we have made. Scrooge gets to do this, but only after he exchanges the analytical apparatus of the cold empiricist, sceptic, and naturalist, for the kindness of Christian compassion. Thus, the warmth of Dickens melts the ice of Hume and everyone has a Merry Christmas rather than a Bah, humbug.

“Here I raise mine Ebenezer”. ‘Twas an enjoyable watch!

Stuart McKinlay: Brilliant observation. Bringing in Hume and the cold eye of empiricism in extremity. I was going to say it seemed Christianity filtered through Catholicism, tinted with tainted Calvinism, Bowdlerized as secularism meets moralising tosh enclosed in a wintry Victorian Christmas card; and a bloody great show that fair made ye think.