Johnny Depp Is the Worst Part of Ebenezer

Johnny Depp is the worst part of Ebenezer, but he’s also the reason it exists, so it’s futile to try and separate his presence from the rest of the movie, which is, inconveniently, pretty good. Ebenezer, a new remake of A Christmas Carol from director Ti West, has been framed as a comeback project for Depp, who’s spent the last half-decade on the outs with Hollywood after a set of astonishingly ugly battles with his ex-wife, Amber Heard, played out in courtrooms and what would turn out to be the much harsher court of public opinion. Depp, who sued Heard for defamation over a 2018 Washington Post op-ed she wrote about speaking up against sexual violence, came out on top legally, though his real triumph was on social media, which turned the trial into an opportunistic content mill of misogyny, conspiratorial speculation, and belated backlash against Me Too. And Depp didn’t exactly vanish from the screen during these years — like other canceled men, he went abroad, making things like mercury poisoning drama Minimata, Cannes 2023 opening-night film Jeanne du Barry, and a Modigliani biopic that he directed. All of which, combined with his yearslong omnipresence as an online topic, makes Ebenezer feel more like a referendum than a return: The industry is officially declaring that it doesn’t care what Depp is alleged to have done.

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It remains to be seen if the public agrees, though people haven’t seemed to universally back away in revulsion from the Depp-forward marketing campaign for the movie, which included the star showing up to Comic-Con in character to introduce the trailer. Maybe it helps that the star has been rendered Tom Cruise–in-Digger levels of unrecognizable as Ebenezer Scrooge, whose backstory, despite a tagline promising this was “the name you know, the story you don’t,” remains generally canonical in Nathaniel Halpern’s screenplay. But Depp is also doing a tiresome variation on the mugging that’s become his primary approach to acting ever since the role of Captain Jack Sparrow vaulted him into Disney-franchise levels of fame — a vaguely comic, scenery-chewing mode that doesn’t fit in with the rest of the movie. When his Ebenezer scowls, it looks weirdly just like Inde Navarette’s much-memed frown in Obsession. When he’s frightened out of bed by one of the three spirits who pay him a visit on a foggy Victorian night, he flops like a fish, casting around strenuously for laughs in a movie that’s otherwise aiming for chills. While the rest of Ebenezer leans toward the horror aspect of Charles Dickens’s novella, Depp appears to think he’s starring in a family comedy.

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I suppose, technically, he could be, at least in the fact the movie is rated PG-13. But it’s also artfully eerie in a way that Depp isn’t able to disrupt. Scale-wise, the movie represents a step up for West, who’s going from the Mia Goth–led X trilogy at A24 to something with a reported $38 million budget, and who approaches A Christmas Carol as, foremost, a ghost story. His 19th-century London is a whole Pinterest board of a cozy creepy aesthetic, with Ebenezer’s counting house positioned alongside a warren of cobbled streets and illuminated windows barely holding back the dark, and his actual home a dim mansion in which he eats porridge by the fire in a sleeping cap. West’s interpretations of the spirits who visit the miser over the small hours of the night are imaginatively spooky, especially the Ghost of Christmas Past, played by Andrea Riseborough as a kind of corpse bride clad all in white with rheumy eyes — a genuinely unsettling spectacle even in the light of day. While still a hearty sensualist, the Ghost of Christmas Present, played by Tramell Tillman, has skin that keeps cracking like old pottery about to shatter, and turns out to be concealing a terrible secret under his fur-trimmed coat. Throughout the evening, hoards of chained ghosts emerge from the graveyard and haunt the streets like it’s some other holiday altogether, Yuletide spirit overcome by nightmares about mortality.

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And while Depp either can’t or simply won’t get on the same earnest page as the rest of the cast, they’re generally commendable — Rupert Grint as beleaguered clerk Bob Cratchit; Sam Claflin as Fred, the nephew Ebenezer shuns; and Daisy Ridley as his wife. But it’s Ian McKellen who stands out as Ebenezer’s partner, Jacob Marley, who in one of the additions to the text is shown alive in the opening scene, as Ebenezer’s only friend and the only man who was able to match him in irascibility. McKellen is the only actor who’s able to bridge what Depp is up to in the rest of the movie, and to spark in his co-star one of his few touches of recognizably human behavior. Ebenezer and Jacob may be a pair of old bastards, but when aimed at one another, their outsize grouchiness looks more like the love language of a pair of friends. To cite two of the stars of an earlier and less fraught adaptation of the same source material, they’re like Statler and Waldorf, and when Jacob dies, Ebenezer is left as the dangling half of a double act, with no one left to volley insults with. That’s probably too generous, but it’s the only way I can explain Depp’s performance. He behaves as though he’s alone onscreen, desperately trying to please the crowd by giving them what they want — whatever that might be. 

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