Ebenezer review: Merry Christmas, Johnny Depp! Is this your comeback yet?

You’re Johnny Depp. Your career — which rests almost entirely on the good will and affection that bubbles to the surface when people hear your name, or at least Captain Jack Sparrow’s — is largely in tatters. 

A very messy, very public series of allegations of on-set assault (including over a lawsuit you settled) and domestic abuse (which you’ve denied), along with news-dominating defamation cases, have cumulatively tarnished your golden-goose reputation. Your last big franchise role, as Gellert Grindelwald in Harry Potter’s Fantastic Beasts spinoff, ended when Warner Bros. asked you to resign after losing your libel lawsuit with the Sun newspaper for calling you a “wife beater.” 

You’ve had few major appearances since. Meanwhile, decades of borderline unbelievable spending sprees saw you acquire a private island and an actual French village (along with nearly enough wine to inebriate the rest of the country) and take on debt rivalling that of some of the world’s more spendthrift small nations. 

What do you do?

Huh, odd. For your first major Hollywood film since concluding your defamation lawsuit against former partner Amber Heard (a trial you largely won, with Heard ordered to give you $10 million US over her abuse allegations), you’ve chosen Ebenezer. A beloved if already endlessly rehashed story. To some, this might read as more of a PR campaign than an actually entertaining movie.

WATCH | Ebenezer trailer:

On second thought, maybe remaking Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol makes a sort of sense. The tale of our titular, miserly Scrooge learning to love Christmas and his fellow man via visitations from one ghost and three spirits is set in Victorian-era England, after all. You once again get to stumble through London streets covered in grime and soot, speaking in the convincing-to-North Americans, upsetting-to-Brits accent you’ve cultivated throughout your career. 

But as you swagger under meticulously threadbare cloaks and period-specific silly hats, it might be hard for audiences to keep the positive feelings they once felt watching Edward Scissorhands, Sweeney Todd or even Charlie and the Chocolate Factory‘s Willy Wonka — in your other modern retelling — from resurfacing. They used to like you, didn’t they?

This decent-enough return feels a lot like that. Can’t they like you again?

Honestly, this isn’t a bad performance. Grimacing and grunting with the best-ish of them, your comedically wide-eyed shrieks and sad-eyed, sentimental monologues pull audiences along Dickens’s classic if admittedly saccharine storyline of bitterness to redemption.

This isn’t a generational Depp performance, nor is it one with much depth or originality. But it is similar to the stuff you used to do. The idiosyncratic smirk and offhandedly humorous patter that undergirded multibillion-dollar movies is still there. That’s worth something, isn’t it?

And you still get an all-star cast to back you up: Ian McKellen as your cautionary-tale business partner Jacob Marley, Rupert Grint as your overworked and underpaid underling Bob Cratchit and Tramell Tillman as the foreboding, pagan-like Ghost of Christmas Present. 

Tramell Tillman, left, plays the Ghost of Christmas Present to Johnny Depp’s Ebenezer Scrooge in Ebenezer. (Jaap Buitendijk/Paramount Pictures)

Each does what they’re there for: deliver arch lines from effectively archetypical — and necessarily one-dimensional — characters. They do so with the express purpose of making your unlovable protagonist suffer enough to, by the end, appear sympathetic and humanized and worthy of re-acceptance into society.

In fact, it’s all familiar and Johnny Depp-typical enough that you leave audiences half-expecting to see Helena Bonham Carter’s face pop up from around every dark, cobblestoned corner. Director Ti West (MaXXXine, Pearl, X) attempts to give the source material his signature campy-horror spin, but instead of the fascinating genre mix of something like Tim Burton’s Scissorhands, what we get is closer to an afternoon pantomime. 

There are the wanton infusions of rattling chains and moaning spectres straight out of Fleet Street central casting. West’s few original interpretations seem to aim for funny while hitting as offensively blunt. For example, instead of Dickens’s trembling child-ghosts representing “ignorance” and “want,” we get monsters closer to Dr. Seuss’s Thing 1 and Thing 2, screeching and chittering along the ground like tiny, see-through ankle-biters from hell.

Redemption roulette

So why did you do it, Johnny? Well if you think about it, relying on this now-cliché story in place of reinvention is perfect for what you need. You’re far from the first celebrity actor to inspire “fall from grace” headlines. And in that near-inexhaustible list of attempts to climb back up, there tends to be a unifying element. 

There are the less successful attempts. Like Will Smith’s painfully self-flagellating Emancipation, about an enslaved man who was so relentlessly and mercilessly beaten that photos of his whip-scarred back helped abolish slavery. Or Kevin Spacey’s amateur-looking The Man Who Drew God, about a blind man wrongfully accused of sexually abusing a child. Then there’s Armie Hammer’s Citizen Vigilante or Jonathan Majors’s Run Hide Fight: Infidels — each about a lone man tirelessly battling people the films frame as scum. 

There are also more successful comebacks. While Winona Ryder returned from criminal conviction obscurity with a small role in Black Swan, her real re-entry into the spotlight was as the endlessly self-sacrificing and reliable mother in Stranger Things. After earning a reputation for poor performances on set and at the box office, Mickey Rourke made a (temporarily) triumphant return as the beaten and broken but valiant protagonist in The Wrestler. 

Robert Downey Jr. cemented perhaps the most impressive comeback of all time, replacing the public’s memory of substance abuse and arrests with his world-saving, devil-may-care billionaire altruist in Iron Man. 

Of course, a movie’s quality has nothing to do with whether a star is, or isn’t, a good person. While not universal, the formula for success is dependable: If you want to rehabilitate a reputation after controversy, frame yourself as the pitiable victim or self-sacrificing hero (or both) in a drama that lightly mirrors your own. 

While Ebenezer may be altogether fine — and about as inventive as the novella’s entry on “Simple Wikipedia” — it at least serves your needs. Based on a story so effective at commanding good will toward humanity that it essentially established the modern idea of Christmas generosity, what more could you ask for?