David R. Walker

Ebenezer

Director: Ti West

Cast: Johnny Depp, Ian McKellan, Rupert Grint, Andrea Riseborough, Sam Claflin, Tramell Tillman, Daisy Ridley, Arthur Conti, Ellie Bamber, Henry Lloyd-Hughes.

Running Time: 1 hour and 56 minutes

Film Rating: 6 out of 10

When the opening credits of Ebenezer blaze in flaming red across the screen and the screenwriters’ names are mentioned while omitting all mention of the fact that Ebenezer is based on a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, I suspected that this wasn’t going to be a faithful reinterpretation of a classic Victorian tale.

40 minutes into the film Ebenezer starts declining although there are some beautiful moments crowded out by a storyline that is emphasizing more a horror story than a morality tale. Who knew there were Zombie Ghosts in a Charles Dickens’ novel?

While three time Oscar nominee Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Finding Neverland) is good as Ebenezer, he is not brilliant, which says more about the director Ti West than Depp himself.

Johnny Depp is a superb actor but he needs a brilliant director to match his talent. Think Tiim Burton or Marc Foster.

Inexperienced director Ti West recreates Ebenezer more as a horror story and fails to take full advantage of one of Charles Dicken’s most memorably mean characters.

Ebenezer Scrooge is mean, rich and nasty and unfortunately in Johnny Depp’s version, this character is still too sweet and bewildering. This 21^st century scrooge is too mild.

In his novella, Dickens created a horrific penny pinching master that hates Christmas who was meant to echoes the horrors of early Victorian England at the start of the industrial revolution filled with debtors’ prisons, bitter poverty and rampant child labour. Think 1840’s and 1850’s.

While the production design by Eve Stewart is sufficient, Ebenezer as a film starts lagging in the middle section and comes across as a dark and dreary narrative made only lighter by one extraordinary performance. That actress is Ellie Bamber who plays the beautiful Belle, Ebenezer’s first love which we see in the first sequence in the ghost of Christmas past.

Young Ebenezer is played by Arthur Conti and Ellie Bamber (Nocturnal Animals) is radiant as Belle, the young lady that could have decisively soften Ebenezer’s hard nature before full manhood and responsibility set in.

The supporting cast is perfectly British with Sam Claflin and Daisy Ridley as Ebenezer’s exasperated nephew Fred and his charming wife.

Depp does his best with a bad director but he should have known that this version of Ebenezer was full of ignorance and want much like the two changelings found inside the Ghost of Christmas Present.

Ebenezer is unfortunately not very authentic and at times the film comes across as a B-grade horror movie with zombies thrown in. Not as inspiring as one should expect. Thankfully Charles Dickens is not alive to see this classic novella butchered on the big screen.

Ebenezer gets a film rating of 6 out of 10 and is not memorable but more disturbing. Eventually the Christmas message comes through but not in a Disney sort of way.

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