What the Dickens: "A Christmas Carol"

The latest screen version of A Christmas Carol - brought to us by the sibling team of Jacqui and David Morris, hitherto best known for their documentaries (McCullin, Attacking the Devil) - has a novel idea at its heart: to do Dickens as a contemporary dance piece, spooking its Scrooge (Michael Nunn) with gyrating ghosts on a studio-set London sprayed deep with fake snow. Had the Morrises presented that film as is, leaving us to interpret the action for ourselves, it might have been something. (It's not as if we don't all know this story by heart, after all, and the filmmakers alight upon the odd striking composition of bodies in rest and motion.) Alas, there appears to have been a failure of creative nerve - or maybe the producers just decided this project needed star names attached to land the pre-sales that would fund the costumes and setbuilding. So it is that the dance film has been tarmacked over by what's effectively a radio play Carol, with key voice roles assumed by Simon Russell Beale, Carey Mulligan, Daniel Kaluuya and Andy Serkis (as Marley's ghost). In a cheeky but self-jeopardising move, those names have been listed before the title in the opening credits, without so much as a "Featuring the voices of" acknowledgement; expectations are raised that the subsequent ninety minutes will only glancingly meet.

The major issue is that these two layers just don't fit together - one's imaginative and expressionistic, the other ploddingly literal and by-the-book. As experiences go, it's a little like watching a director's commentary on a version of A Christmas Carol that might have served as a semi-diverting standalone item were it not for all the illustrious (and yet oddly anonymous) jabbering on the soundtrack. I say semi-diverting, because for all the dance film's gestures towards a new, greatly more mobile Dickens, everyone on screen is still prancing around the same shopworn Victorian imagery: the framing is nowhere near as arrestingly bold as Steven Knight's post-Peaky Blinders BBC adaptation from last Christmas, nor as playful as the film of Simon Callow's one-man Christmas Carol that toured cinemas two years ago. Instead, the Morrises cling to an old-school, more than faintly educative feel, flashing up chunks of text and period storybook illustrations whenever their dancers need to catch their breath. It remains, unarguably, a damn good story, and maybe this Christmas Carol will eventually come to find a home in classrooms across the land. But kids will forever prefer to approach this text via The Muppet Christmas Carol - and I have a terrible feeling that, for all the craft and artistry the Morrises showcase here, teachers might, too.

A Christmas Carol opens today in cinemas nationwide.