“Bah humbug!”
It's quite a statement of intent to begin an adaptation of A Christmas Carol with a boy pissing on a bloke's grave, but that's what happens here. It's a very clear sign that the three hours of Dickensian drama that lie before us are going to be devoid of the normal schmaltz and sentimentality.
This is a grubby, harsh and, well, Dickensian London, just before Christmas 1843. It's a time of poverty, suffering, starvation and sickness, long before the Welfare State and, indeed, probably where we're headed in the next few years, unprotected by EU membership from Trump's rapacious designs on our food and our health system and where the Welfare State is becoming deeply unfashionable to those in power, much like such things as objective truth, the BBC, an independent Civil Service and, you know, institutions that one imagines a "Conservative" ought to want to preserve. But I digress. At least, in 1843, things were getting better. They had Sir Robert Peel, not "Sir" Iain bloody Duncan Smith.
None of that hope means much to poor Bob Cratchit, forced to work for an unusually lean Ebenezer Scrooge in the shape of Guy Pearce, a cynical smartarse who manages to be just likeable enough as an antihero. There's a long scene of dialogue between Cratchit and Scrooge, with Cratchit anxious to get home for Christmas Eve from his job as a human photocopier, or "clerk" in 1843 speak, which nicely gives us all the necessary exposition about his family's unfortunate situation and their respective situations. This side of thngs is almost traditional.
However, all this stuff with Jacob Marley and a very hellish Purgatory (it's all very Catholic but then it's a concept rather necessary to the idea of a ghost)- it's all very dark, scary, visual and not in the novella. Nor is this odd little sub-plot with Mrs Cratchit's cousin. And surely if, on Christmas Eve, Scrooge is told there will be three ghosts on successive midnights, this will take him long past Christmas morning?
This is brazen, bold, brave and different. Is it going to work? Well, the jury's out.
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