There are at least 28 film versions of Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol, from the silent film era to the modern. Throw a stick in any direction at this time of year, and it’ll hit a version of A Christmas Carol then bounce off and hit another. There’s a reason for this: It’s a durable and highly adaptable story, and there are good-to-great adaptations as animation (more than once), as a musical (more than once), as a modernized update (more than once), as a parody, as a Muppets vehicle, as a Mr. Magoo vehicle, as a relatively straightforward adaptation, as a big-budget 3D CGIfest. With all these versions, you’d think someone would have gotten the damn story right by now.

But no. There’s room for one more version: the perfect one.

I have some authority here. I’ve seen many different versions of A Christmas Carol, re-watching them every year over and over. Every year I re-read A Christmas Carol compulsively throughout December. I study it. I listen to multiple audiobook versions* when I sleep, when I run, when I drive to and from work, when I’m at work. I’ve never counted how many times I’ve read the Dickens novel, but it must easily be multiple dozens by now. I’ve never tried, but I could probably recite whole stretches of it from memory. A Christmas Carol is one of my favorite stories because of its charm and simplicity, but the more I stare into it the more complex I see it actually is.

If I could work my will, I’d give A Christmas Carol the full BBC miniseries treatment. My model is the BBC miniseries version of Pride and Prejudice, as perfect a translation of that 19th century novel as anyone could ever hope for. I think a 3-hour version of A Christmas Carol would do it, possibly 4 hours, and it would hew very closely to the original text with possibly a few added scenes that have shown up in various film versions throughout the 20th century that improve the story.**  The story needs and deserves a larger canvas than the 90-to-120-minute film and television versions allow. It needs more realism than they strive for. And here’s the key thing that very, very few good A Christmas Carol adaptations understand. I’m going to say it in very large type, because it’s that important. Ready?

A Christmas Carol is not a kiddie story.

It really isn’t, at all. It’s somehow acquired that reputation because of its simplicity, its short length, its easily understood moral, its fable-like quality, its deliriously happy ending, its holiday setting. It teaches kids to love Christmas because it’s a time to be joyous and generous and warm, and not stingy. A Christmas Carol is commonly taught to children, and it should be, because it’s a great story with good values and a perfect introduction to 19th century literature. But it is not fundamentally a children’s story, and the motive for Ebenezer Scrooge’s redemption isn’t necessarily something most children could fully appreciate the gravity of -- it’s fundamentally the story of a man who realizes he’s lived a painful life full of rejection and regret, and he’s wasted decades of it acquiring wealth he can never fully use or leave behind to anyone, ruined a relationship with his only living relative, and because he’s spent so many years hardening his heart he’s going to die alone and unloved and unmourned, his possessions picked clean by ghouls and sold in some foul rag-and-bone shop. He realizes that he’s coming perilously close to dying without having done anything in life with meaning. Even the deliriously happy ending, where Scrooge is won over by the spirit of Christmas and gives generously to the poor, patches up his broken relationships with his clerk and his nephew, and in one breathless rush of a chapter goes from being an utter bastard to the living embodiment of generosity, is still, if you think about it, tinged with deep sadness -- Scrooge let the only woman he ever loved slip away, and he knows he can never get her back. There is no hope there, and he has to live with it. A Christmas Carol about an old man learning to accept the profound regret of a life he wasted, and trying in his old age to make at least some amends for it in whatever small way he can -- by being generous to his friends, family, and his society. This is deep psychological stuff for kids, who at a young age don’t have the experience of ruined years to look back on and brood over. So why keep treating A Christmas Carol like it’s just a kiddie story?

There are echoes of all that stuff above in the text itself. A few choice lines spoken by the ghost of Jacob Marley when he visits Scrooge make this plain.

“Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,” cried the phantom ... “Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!”

Most versions of A Christmas Carol cut these lines out. I guess they do so for time, but also because they’re written in that tricky 19th century diction that makes them difficult for kids to work through. But listen to what Marley says: he’s describing the endless pain of eternity compared to the shortness of life on Earth. He’s saying you only have a few years during which you can be useful to your fellow beings, and after that it’s an eternity of nostalgia and pain and inability to do anything but suffer in some way. Worse: even if you’re a pretty good person, you’re still going to find life far too brief once you’re floating around in eternity as a ghost, unable to improve the world as profoundly as you would’ve liked and feeling regretful about this, forever.  “No rest, no peace,” he tells Scrooge. “Incessant torture of remorse.” That’s how Marley’s ghost spends his days for the past seven years, and what he can look forward to for the next seven billion. And even though he’s somehow able to intercede with humanity to improve Scrooge’s life, this is going to have no bearing whatsoever on Marley’s afterlife. He may have a tiny glimmer of joy, because he was able to keep Scrooge from being tortured as badly as he is, but Marley is still nevertheless going to be wracked by agonizing psychological pain until the heat death of the universe.

There are other bits of the story that often get excised from film versions, probably for time, but which need to be in my big-long-BBC-miniseries version for the story to be true and proper and perfect. Most film versions make Scrooge’s turnaround the moment when he realizes he’s going to die the next year. But they’re missing the point. In the novel it’s not so much the fear of death itself that converts him, but how that death occurs and what happens afterward. The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come showing Scrooge his own corpse, for example -- another horrifying moment, witnessing his body barely covered with a sheet and his room plundered of all valuables, with no mourners and no one even seeming to worry about burying him, hearing cats and rats tearing through the door and walls. “What they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so restless and disturbed,” the text reads, “Scrooge did not dare to think.” I do. They’re going to pick at his dead flesh and eat it. Dickens was not fucking around.

Another commonly excised part that needs to be in the massive-truly-perfect version: Scrooge hanging out with The Ghost of Christmas Present. The films typically show Scrooge and the ghost visiting a few Christmas parties: that of Bob Cratchit and his family, and that of his nephew. In the novel, Scrooge and the ghost not only visit these two parties to open his heart, but they spend an entire day together, and visit the whole globe:

Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes they visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood beside sick beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands, and they were close at home; by struggling men, and they were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was rich. In almshouse, hospital, and jail, in misery’s every refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door and barred the Spirit out, he left his blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts.

There are even short scenes of the two visiting a lighthouse, a mine, and a ship, showing how lonely, poor, and working-class people can derive at least a small amount of joy from the spirit of Christmas. The ghost teaches Scrooge how to celebrate the holiday, and how people at all social levels celebrate in their own ways. Stave Three is the most overtly political of the chapters, and that needs to hold true in any good adaptation, because A Christmas Carol is a political book. Not just that -- it’s a politically liberal book.  When Scrooge early on in the story says the poor should either go to debtors prison or die, and bitches about how he’s not going to give a penny to charity because he already supports the poor by paying his taxes, he’s mouthing the same garbage I hear from right-wing nitwits who have taken the essential conservative message that every person should work hard and save their money, and perverted it to make a virtue out of heartlessness toward people lower than them on the socioeconomic scale -- he believes in the simplistic lie that all poor people deserve to be poor and then deserve to be punished because of it, and would rather wallow in his ignorance rather than actually meeting poor people and learning that sometimes poor people are poor because of the vicissitudes of life: disease, lack of education or breeding, choices in lifestyle or career that didn’t pay off, random accidents, &c.  Scrooge is one of those ultraconservative idiots I see all over the Internet who feel justified in judging and dictating how working-class people should live when he’s never bothered to meet any of them, because he thinks his own life is a noble example, when in fact the whole book is about some of the awful choices he’s made in life.  “Oh God!” the spirit tells him. “To hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust.” It’s not enough that Scrooge needs to learn why he’s wasted his one life -- he needs to see what he’s missed by shutting out all human company and thinking of himself as somehow more deserving of nobility than the poor: life, everywhere, a whole planet teeming with it. And it reveals to Scrooge, a man who had shut out all of humanity’s needs except his own -- and reveals to all of us -- everyone’s puny place on the planet. Scrooge needs to see the suffering that is common with the poor who labor even on Christmas to make his cushy life more comfortable: the miners who dig for coal to keep London going, the lighthouse-keepers who watch for ships bringing in cargo.  Meeting all these people along the lower rungs of the economic ladder is an important lesson in humility, and it needs to be present in any good version.

I could go on at more length about what a perfect film version of A Christmas Carol would feature,**** but I want to get to the absolutely most necessary part of the story and which is almost always not part of the film.

If your acquaintance with the story is limited to the usual traditional film versions shown at Christmastime, then this is generally what happens toward the end of Scrooge’s meeting with The Ghost of Christmas Past: the spirit shows Scrooge and his fiancee, Belle, breaking up. She dumps him, basically, because he’s become too greedy. She dumps him on a Christmas, too, evidently. Scrooge (the one of the present) becomes stricken at his former foolish self and begs the ghost to take him back to his room. That’s where that segment ends, generally -- the Alistair Sim version goes on a bit after that, with some extra scenes showing Scrooge and Marley forming their business and Marley’s death, moments not in the novel. But in the George C. Scott***** and Albert Finney versions, that segment ends right after Belle dumps him. In the book, a similar thing happens, and Scrooge begs the ghost to go home -- but the spirit instead forces Scrooge (as in, forces him physically) to see what becomes of his fiancee many years later.

Scrooge sees her become a beautiful older woman, with many gorgeous and happy children, in a modest but comfortable home with a husband who loves her. It’s a simple but genuinely happy household, full of warmth and love:

And now Scrooge looked on more attentively than ever, when the master of the house, having his daughter lean fondly on him, sat down with her and her mother at his own fireside; and when he thought that such another creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise might have called him father, and been a spring-time in the haggard winter of his life, his sight grew very dim indeed.

Then the husband reveals that this scene takes place seven years ago, by telling his wife that he’s actually seen Scrooge, with his partner Marley on his deathbed, still working in his office -- alone. “Quite alone in the world, I do believe.”

This is when Scrooge snaps, utterly heartbroken, and tells the spirit to remove him, and snuffs out the ghost. And this is when and why Scrooge changes. I’m going to repeat it again in big letters, because that’s how important it is:

This is when and why Scrooge changes.

It’s not enough for Scrooge to get dumped by his girl. He must see how much of a better life she’s had without him.  He must see exactly how badly he’s wasted his whole life. He must see that he’s never, ever going to be a father. He’s never going to have a family. He’s never going to have the kind of happiness she and her husband have. It doesn’t even matter, by the end of the story, how drastically Scrooge changes to become a good person -- he’s past the point in his life where he can have a family like that.  It’s never going to happen.  All he can do is assemble a kind of happiness from what he’s got left, by caring for the Cratchits and getting Tim the right doctors and rebuilding his relationship with his nephew, by having a vicarious family. But he is never, ever going to have a family of his own. He’s never going to have a loving wife. He’s never going to have children. He didn’t even know he wanted those things until now -- and once he’s seen them he realizes he does want them, but they’re gone forever, and he’ll be left with regret for the rest of existence.  This is a part of the story that Scrooge can’t fix, no matter how good he becomes. He throws his money around at the end of the story, but he won’t be able to buy his way into a family that happy.  He will never know the joy of being a husband and father.  This bitterness must be present in the story for the ending to be anything less than treacle. This is an incurable sadness that must be mixed into the story’s joy for that happiness to have meaning and depth.

It’s pretty crushing. I don’t know why it keeps getting cut out of the films’ screenplays, because this scene is the whole point. Scrooge doesn’t change because he’s afraid he’ll die and go to hell. Scrooge doesn’t change because he feels bad that his clerk’s son is crippled with less than a year to live. Scrooge doesn’t change because he likes hanging out at his nephew’s house at Christmas. He doesn’t change because he realizes it’s not good to be stingy.  He changes because he sees and understands that his whole adult life has been wasted at pointless work.  He’s going to die leaving no one who ever loved him, acquiring wealth that he can’t leave to his children and will be scavenged by criminals, and he’s completely alone. He might one day have the love of friends and his nephew and strangers, but he is never going to have the love of a spouse and a close family.

I’ve been going on here for a while, but I guess my real goal is to get you to re-read the novel (or read it for the first time, which if you never have before, shame on you because it’s short and will only take a couple of hours at most). There’s no way I’ll ever get the kind of super-deluxe faithful-and-then-some film version -- partially because the market is already saturated with pretty good versions, and partially because the book has this longstanding reputation as a simple kiddie story with no depth, a reputation which ignores the book’s more complex emotional moments and political themes in favor of a simplistic, moralistic story about a miser who becomes generous. I know Dickens was actually aiming for simple when he originally wrote it,****** but because he’s such a good storyteller he inadvertently imbued the story with a lot more emotional depth than there originally appears on the surface, if you really study it. A good filmmaker could dredge that up and bring it closer to the surface. But I won’t get it. I’ll have to be filled with regret myself, and make do with the book and a cobbled-together film version that exists entirely in my own head, until someone fulfills my Christmas wish.

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UPDATE: Upon watching the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol again this year, I was stunned to realize that it does contain the aforementioned scene, where Scrooge sees what became of his former fiancee. But it’s done so poorly that I must’ve blocked it out of memory. Throughout the film, Scott’s version of Ebenezer Scrooge has a kind of detached cockiness, an officiousness that’s appropriate for someone who’s a man of business but which has the unfortunate side effect of seeming dismissive and uninterested. His Scrooge seems like not only a stingy uncaring miser, but also kind of a douche. He grins more than most versions of Scrooge I’m familiar with, is more sarcastic. He seems genuinely hateful, not pitiable. These qualities give this version of the story a mean, ugly flavor, which is why this is one of the least fun versions. It’s all evident in this version of that above scene. Scrooge begins by telling The Ghost of Christmas Past that he had a damn good reason for letting Belle leave him -- he was making his way in business, and he seems proud of the job he’s done. He seems to have no regret about her screwing off. Then he sees Belle with her kids, and with a sly grin he chuckles, “What a brood! Fancy: They might have been mine.” He chuckles! He’s amused by the whole thing! He’s not fucking crushed at all! Apart from the observation that he might’ve had those kids with her, he seems only barely interested. Scott’s choice to make Scrooge haughty works against the story and the character here. Even worse is the poor direction. The director has Scrooge see what could have been his family and react as if he’s just heard a mildly amusing piece of trivia. It’s all wrong. Belle’s husband tells her that he passed by Scrooge’s office windows and saw Scrooge alone in there while his business partner lay dying; Belle suddenly turns somber and says, “Poor Ebenezer. Poor wretched man.” Scrooge, upon hearing this, becomes enraged at her, showing that hate that seems to seethe just below the surface every moment in Scott’s portrayal -- and he hisses, “Spare me your pity! I have no need of it!” It doesn’t cause Scrooge to reflect on what he’s lost. Instead he becomes openly hostile toward Belle and the Ghost, and he snuffs out the Ghost with its extinguisher cap while it chants, “Truth lives!” for some reason, the whole time Scrooge growling and gnashing his teeth with satisfaction. This version takes what should be a profoundly sad moment and turns it into a scene of Scrooge lashing out because his ego was bruised -- like, “Don’t feel sorry for me, baby -- I ended up rich! Fuck you!” It’s so poorly staged and misses the point so wildly that it made me forget the scene was even there. Just thought I’d mention it.