A Christmas Carol (2019)

utty, muscular, textured and with Guy Pearce (imagine! Dishy Mike from Neighbours a Dickensian miser) delivering an intense, complex performance as Scrooge that was restrained enough never to become caricature, but potent enough to make you believe he was a darkened soul who really did despise humanity.

It ought to be too hammy to hang together, and it would probably have worked as a one-off film rather than the full three-hour mini-series, but I found myself watching, mainly due to the central performances.

If the goal was to produce a version that would still leave you feeling kind of lousy, like a bleak lump of coal in your stocking, as opposed to infused with Christmas cheer, well, mission sort-of accomplished, but to what end?

This is one hell of a hellish slog toward a redemption that isn’t really earned, given what Ebenezer once did to Bob Cratchit’s desperate wife, a woman of color played by Vinette Robinson.

Yes, you’ve seen this story before, but you’ve undoubtedly had more fun watching someone else’s take on it.

That’s all this is: piss, vinegar, and sputtering, with some good acting around to make it all just barely tolerable.

It plumbs the depths of darkness to the point that even the usually buoyant Cratchit Family is dragged down with Scrooge. But without a redemptive rise to counterbalance all that darkness, A Christmas Carol misses out on the meaning of the story and the greater meaning of the Christmas season.

The result is that FX has made a Christmas Carol that very much isn't for children — seriously, the wee ones will be either bored or scandalized — and probably isn't really for adults either. At its very best, it's an attempted in-depth character study of Scrooge, one that meshes very poorly with the inspiring structure of the story, while at its worst it's an ill-paced, ill-focused version of A Christmas Carol.

Between the overuse of dark lens filters, the grinding sorrow hovering over everything, and the spirit-deflating, narrative-defeating addition of a sexual abuse subplot, this “Christmas Carol” is short on joy and very, very, very long on purgatorial slogging. ... The impressive cast can only offset the dourness to a point.

Pearce is undeniably good, but the script, with its aphoristic philosophy planted in the mouth of a character who’d historically been a fairly unintellectual money-hoarder, never allows him to compel us. And the visual vocabulary feels skittish and chaotic, presenting ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future that are unpleasant to look at and time jumps that can at times confuse. ... [Bob and Mary Cratchit are] written to truly despise Scrooge, and to want their time with him ended. Their performances sell it, but you’d join them and relate regardless.