In Review: ‘Ebenezer,’ ‘I Play Rocky’

(Programming note: We'll be back tomorrow with reviews of Victorian Psycho, How to Rob a Bank, and Bitter Christmas.)

Ebenezer
Dir. Ti West
116 min.

At this point, there’s no reason for a creator without a distinctive spin on the material to contribute to the stack of adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol that already exist. Fortunately, this new version from Ti West (The House of the Devil, Pearl) has one. Unfortunately, Ebenezer also has a huge problem at its center that’s impossible to ignore in spite of the film’s virtues.

Let’s start with the positive: As West’s past work suggests, Ebenezer is a horror film—or as much as a horror film as it can be within the guardrails created by the need to also be an inviting holiday movie for the whole family. West and cinematographer Checco Varese drape scene after scene in darkness through which candlelight struggles to cut. Ebenezer feels spooky before the ghosts show up, and even spookier once they make an appearance. Ian McKellen plays Scrooge’s old partner Jacob Marley as an entity tormented by the fate that will await Scrooge if he doesn’t change his ways. Pale, skeletal, and (almost literally) glassy-eyed, Andrea Riseborough makes for an unusually chilling Ghost of Christmas Past. Even the traditionally jolly Ghost of Christmas Present, played by Tramell Tillman, becomes a body horror-inspired creation as he slowly withers away. (And wait until you see how West and screenwriter Nathaniel Halpern reconceive Ignorance and Want.)

The approach sometimes goes too far. Though initially teased as the untold origin story of Ebenezer Scrooge, Ebenezer mostly stays true to the source material while adding a few edgy touches that try too hard to be edgy—like depicting the dark fate awaiting poor Mr. Fezziwig—while also fleshing out the reason Scrooge is so mean. The sometimes plodding pace becomes an issue, too, particularly as Scrooge’s night stretches on. The spirits may have done it all in one night, but it sometimes feels as if they risk blowing that deadline as one familiar Dickens episode follows another.

Still, this would be a worthwhile addition to the long list of Christmas Carol adaptations if it weren’t built around an obnoxious Johnny Depp performance as Scrooge. Depp’s nearly unrecognizable beneath the prosthetics and it often seems as if he’s trying to mug his way out from under them. He looks like a wax museum grotesque and barks and scowls his way through the film as if he knew he’d be competing with a Godzilla movie the next theater over. Depp has been on the sidelines for a while, for reasons much-documented elsewhere. His first big studio film in eight years, Ebenezer gives him a chance to make a case for his return to the multiplexes, but it plays like a desperate attempt to remind audiences about how dynamic and unpredictable he once was. In one scene, the Ghost of Christmas Present suggests that Scrooge still has a “flicker” of humanity to him. Good luck finding one in his performance. —Keith Phipps

Ebenezer makes its first visitation in theaters tonight.

I Play Rocky
Dir. Peter Farrelly
128 min.

It is a fun exercise to think about the postscript to I Play Rocky, a shameless yet mostly disarming movie about Sylvester Stallone and the making of an improbable Best Picture winner. Stallone’s marriage to Sasha Czack (AnnaSophia Robb), the shutterbug who follows him from New York to Hollywood and works closely with him on the screenplay? It ended in 1985, the same year he married his Rocky IV co-star Brigitte Nielsen. (Which also ended in divorce two years later.) His close partnership with co-producer Irwin Winkler (P.J. Byrne), who rolled the dice on a raw and unproven talent? It collapsed into a decades-long feud over rights that continues to spill out in public. As for Stallone’s other Rocky films and his career in general? He’s been an undeniably massive force in the entertainment industry, but he was not exactly the next John Cassavetes. 

With I Play Rocky, director Peter Farrelly drafts off the legend, presenting the story of Rocky as the blissfully uncomplicated tale of an underdog who wrote his own ticket to stardom and wouldn’t let anyone take it away from him. Of course, in broad strokes, it’s a true story, and broad strokes have been filling Farrelly’s canvases for years, whether he’s making gross-out comedies like Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary with his brother Bobby or his own underdog Oscar-winner in Green Book, which is more his mode here. (Between this and Green Book, Farrelly cranked out the streaming comedies The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Ricky Stanicky, and Balls Out. Not exactly John Cassavetes, either.) That I Play Rocky works anyway seems like an oddly fitting tribute to Stallone, whose many flaws and missteps have somehow not eroded his essential appeal. He’ll always be the lovable lug that no one believed in, even if there’s more to it than that. 

I Play Rocky would collapse into Saturday Night Live caricature with the wrong man in the lead role, but Anthony Ippolito resembles a young Stallone so uncannily that you’re not hung up on the impression. The parallels between Stallone’s life and Rocky Balboa are hammered early and often, as Ippolito’s Stallone lives in squalor while working dead-end day jobs and keeping himself fit through an urban gymnasium of park jogs and tree-branch pull-ups. After meeting Sasha at a movie theater gig, the two fall in love and relocate in Los Angeles, where he auditions for roles and works on scripts while working as a valet. One night, he watches a fight between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner, a white palooka who lasts for 15 rounds before finally getting TKO-ed. In a little over three days of longhand writing—in a too-cute touch, he’s shown icing his swollen left hand like a boxer—he drops a script on Winkler and Bob Chartoff’s (Toby Kebbell) desk. 

From there, I Play Rocky turns into a movie about moviemaking, which is when it’s most pleasurable. The casting pays off again with Tracy Letts in a scene-stealing role as a bellicose United Artists executive who hates boxing movies and hates the idea of Stallone in the lead even more, and Jay Duplass playing Rocky director John G. Avildsen as a no-bullshit craftsman who’s asked to make art on a shoestring. The inspirational meta-fiction of Rocky as the story of Sylvester Stallone himself is a big reason the film won Best Picture in a stacked field, and there’s a cynical calculation to I Play Rocky reproducing the effect to its own end. Yet Farrelly keeps the tone light and his intentions earnest, and what emerges is an ode to low-budget filmmaking and the scrappy, resourceful artists who are able to will their way through the process. Resistance is futile. — Scott Tobias

I Play Rocky is currently playing in select theaters. It opens in wide release on November 20th.