Vice’s Gritty Multimedia Reboot of “A Christmas Carol” Met With Universal Praise

Christopher Cantwell, praised by critics for his re-imagining of Ebeneezer Scrooge as a cowardly neo-Nazi (YouTube)

By JONATHAN KIM     August 17, 2017

LOS ANGELES – The first chapter of Vice Media’s gritty re-imagining of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” was released on YouTube earlier this week. Titled “Charlottesville: Race and Terror,” the take-no-prisoners reboot of the beloved Christmas classic was followed up yesterday by its second half, “Crying Nazi Snowflake Needs a Safe Space.”

The multimedia endeavor has garnered near universal acclaim, with critics and viewers alike praising the filmmakers for so perfectly capturing the texture and relevance of the original work without resorting to cynicism or melodrama. Matt Zoller Seitz, writing for RogerEbert.com, said that the film’s first half “Perfectly re-packages the violence, detachment and hubris of the original protagonist’s worldview; instead of the pleas of street urchins stomped out underfoot by the capitalist greed of Ebeneezer Scrooge, we are witness to the weary humanity of Charlottesville’s citizens as they struggle with the evil and callousness of white supremacy and neo-Nazi violence. The bewildered rage of a bespectacled black man – his spirit crushed by watching James Alex Fields, Jr murder and maim wholesale a crowd of local counter-protesters – bears more weight and truth than a thousand Tiny Tims.”

The film reinterprets Ebeneezer Scrooge as Christopher Cantwell, a man whose hate for immigrants, liberals, and black Americans is matched only by his childlike preoccupation with violence. We watch Cantwell eagerly anticipate violent opposition, his eyes lighting up with glee any time he thinks a counter-protester might push or shove one of his neo-Nazi compatriots, so that he might unleash righteous retaliatory fury. At one point, Cantwell waxes on about the fantasy of someday being forced to kill a dangerous adversary with one of his six different firearms, all of which he puts on jubilant display for the audience in a scene more reminiscent of a child showing off his toy collection. Cantwell’s words barely veil his obvious desire to foment violence so that he might strike down his deadly opponents.

Cantwell’s deadly opponents never materialize. Like most protests in the United States and throughout the Western world, the violence never escalates to the small-arms-fire battle that Cantwell and his friends wish it would. Armed militiamen, coated in tactical armor and sporting semi-automatic rifles, stand as impotent as clusters of carolers might have in Dickens’s original version; full of spirit, but unable to satisfy any purpose.

It is these images of white men, armed and postured for action in the name of their racial superiority, that drives the narrative of the first half of the film, with Cantwell’s disdain and nearly Vaudevillian lack of understanding of the black experience in America matched only by his mania for perceived oppression. It is this total ignorance of American culture, and his narrow, paranoid preoccupation with unnumbered imaginary antagonists that perfectly set up the second half of this masterpiece.

“Crying Nazi Snowflake Needs a Safe Space” is the exquisite followup to the film’s first part, and features a tearful and terrified Cantwell, suddenly faced with the consequences of his actions and beliefs, bawling helplessly at the prospect of being in trouble with the law.

The messaging is obvious: Cantwell shows utter disdain for minorities in the United States, who must face the reality of increased and fatally-disproportionate law enforcement action on a daily basis, but when he himself is suddenly in the position of possibly facing an arrest warrant, his bravado crumbles immediately, and he lacks the basic emotional strength and resolve that the minorities he so despises manage to muster when placed in the exact same situation. One need look only as far as the shooting of Philandro Castille and witness the staunch resolve of Diamond Reynolds as she stared down the smoking barrel of a trigger-happy officer’s gun, and one sees the grimly comic difference. Cantwell shouldn’t be anywhere near the kitchen, because forget the heat… even the thought of an open flame brings him to tears.

Some critics felt that the second half’s outcome was a little too on the nose, but conceded that the raw, pathetic emotion on display more than made up for its rote narrative shortcomings.

While critics fawned over this daring re-imagining of “A Christmas Carol,” they are universally unimpressed with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s half-baked reboot of the Cold War, hoping that the production will fizzle before it reaches completion.