Johnny Depp's Ebenezer Features One Character Most Adaptations Usually Cut

At this point in the life of Charles Dickens' 1843 novella "A Christmas Carol," so many stage and screen adaptations have been produced that the process of boiling the story down to its core elements has turned them into veritable tropes unto themselves. This aspect was being parodied as long ago as 1988's "Scrooged," which utilized an adaptation-within-an-adaptation as a bit of meta satire, as well as a commentary on how rote adapting Dickens' tale had become. Everything from a Victorian London setting to the line "God bless us, everyone" became not just quintessential to a new adaptation, but necessary, in much the same manner as the umpteenth cover of a popular song carries its own expectations. In a similar fashion to the elements which began to be regarded as a must-include, there were some other elements seen in Dickens' novella which got treated as unnecessary, and thus became more and more overlooked.

The most notable of these latter elements is the presence of a sister character for Ebenezer Scrooge. It would be erroneous to say that the sister is always cut from "A Christmas Carol" adaptations. After all, Fan Scrooge (as played by Carol Marsh) appears in one of the most revered film versions of the story, Brian Desmond Hurst's "A Christmas Carol" from 1951 starring Alistair Sim. Yet Fan or her equivalent tends to be missing or altered in most modern adaptations. She's nowhere in "Scrooged" or "The Muppet Christmas Carol," and she's heavily changed in the 2019 BBC miniseries starring Guy Pearce. This month's "Ebenezer," then, holds the honor of reinstating a sister character close to Dickens' Fan after a lengthy absence. While this is admirable, the reason for it doing so is due to the film's awkward revisionist take on Scrooge, as played by Johnny Depp.

In "Ebenezer" as in "A Christmas Carol," Scrooge is reunited with his sister during his trip through his earlier years, courtesy of the Ghost of Christmas Past (Andrea Riseborough). As in Dickens' novella, the sister is a fairly beatific figure, a protector of the bullied (and, it's heavily implied, abused by their father) Scrooge. In the film, screenwriter Nathaniel Halpern has renamed the sister from Fan to Molly (for what reason, only he knows), played by Rose Williams. 

On the one hand, one wonders why so many adaptations mess around with the character, considering how important she is to Scrooge's nephew, Fred (Sam Claflin). She's literally his mother, and the idea of Scrooge shunning Fred due to his discomfort over the untimely death of his beloved sister is a good source of dramatic tension.

Yet on the other hand, it's likely that most adaptations either reconfigure or leave the sister out because her presence exists to humanize Scrooge in a way that some adaptations would rather not deal with. The sister and her fleshing out of Scrooge's origin story, as it were, forces the character to be more nuanced. Of course, most intelligent audience members should be able to understand that a young victim turned adult monster doesn't mean his misdeeds are automatically forgiven, yet those who think of "A Christmas Carol" primarily as a story for young children might. 

In any case, "Ebenezer" corrects this error too far the other way, adding to it some other odd changes which make Scrooge a little too sympathetic. At least director Ti West and company don't let him completely off the hook, either, but it's too bad that the sister is re-included in the film for little more reason than as a character witness.

"Ebenezer" is in theaters now.