Rating: 15/20
Plot: A Great Depression era retelling of the Charles Dickens classic.
With Henry Winkler, just two years after he infamously jumped that shark in those little blue shorts and his leather jacket, as the wonderfully-named Benedict Slade, the Scrooge character. And it might seem like this television adaptation is proverbially jumping the shark by having Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli playing the iconic character, like a bad joke caked in forty-three years of make-up, but the Fonz pulls it off, only tempted to slap one jukebox with the bottom of his fist in this whole production. He's solid as grumpy, misanthropic Slade, a role that requires an actor to nearly carry the whole movie. He's not as convincing, oddly enough, as the young Slade, but I may have been too focused on whether or not his mustache was real. However, he was excellent as a twelve-year-old, and I'm not sure how the makers of this pulled off that wizardry. It must be the same people who magically make those Hobbit actors tiny. This suffers, as a version of A Christmas Carol, from the viewer being far too familiar with the story and character arc, the latter always just a little too swift and unconvincing for me. The basic story works, packing in the same emotion you'd expect as the Fonz revisits his past, has an epiphany or two while stalking folks in the present, and then feels threatened in the future. And he gets to ask a child what day it is from a second-story window which seems to be a must in versions of this story. I did really like the changes to the story, the transformation to America during the Great Depression seeming like a natural move. This also suffers from being a television production with the budget allowed for those sorts of things. There's far too much music during some scenes, and even though it shouldn't matter, I could have used a special effect or two during the scenes with the ghosts. Actually, I'm not even sure they were ghosts. The movie seems cheap, but it makes up for it by getting all the dust and antique stoves right to nail the Great Depression setting. Like I would even know. I also liked the philosophies underlying this timeless story. The simple idea of Hell as nothing more than being forced to relieve your past and the definition of evil being what a person does not do are strong themes, and as cheesy as the whole object lesson with the stick that winds up framing Slade's story might be, it's an effective way to capture what the whole Dickens story is really about. This isn't the best version of A Christmas Carol because it doesn't have a single puppet in it, but it is an above-average retelling that fans of the story should check out.
Just checked my spelling--How is "Fonzarelli" not a word?
No comments:
Post a Comment