| You land on an aspect of Scrooge sometimes overlooked: the man is willfully the curmudgeon he has become, not a clueless victim of his narrative. So many iterations work with the suspense-free arc that Scrooge's ghosts are contemporary therapists. Though this single night is decidedly an intervention, in a sense, only the first ghost, uncovering the origin story, functions thus. Scrooge should rightly balk at what Chayefsky famously called a rubber-ducky story, refusing to settle on some childhood/adolescent anecdote as the basis for his acquired misanthropy. Sounds like Mays holds onto the adult persona Ebenezer created as long as he dares, cutting sentimentality from a tale often lazily clotted with it. |
