Scrooged
‘Tis the season to celebrate our favourite Scrooge, back on the big screen as Michael Caine and the Muppets return to cinemas for the 30th anniversary of The Muppets Christmas Carol. Sam Moore celebrates a legend.
He could have been acting with Daniel Day-Lewis. But instead of the three-time Oscar winning thespian, Michael Caine shared a set with Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear and co for a Muppets take on the Charles Dickens classic novel A Christmas Carol. It made no difference to the actor, who to children of the ‘90s was best known as the man in one of your dad’s favourite movies like Zulu, The Italian Job or The Ipcress File, he acted with those puppets as if they were Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson.
Caine told director Brian Henson as much before landing the role of Ebeneezer Scrooge: “I’m going to play this movie like I’m working with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I will never wink, I will never do anything Muppety. I am going to play Scrooge as if it is an utterly dramatic role and there are no puppets around me.” And it’s Caine’s utterly unbridled commitment to the bit that transcends it to one of the finest performances across his 60-year career.
Despite the fact he had recently collaborated with Miss Piggy puppeteer Frank Oz on the brilliantly farcical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Caine was far from the obvious choice to be the human lead of a Muppets movie. Even though as Scrooge he would be playing the straightest of straight men, Caine and Kermit just doesn’t seem like a natural match, especially when the role would require his iconic cockney accent to do some singing. But then, if you’d seen Bob Hoskins in Mona Lisa or The Long Good Friday, you would never expect him to be capable of the slapstick brilliance he displayed as Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Caine seems to take inspiration from Hoskins’ performance as the burly detective. His Mona Lisa co-star, while embracing the slapstick on his odyssey with an animated bunny, didn’t put an ounce of irony into his performance. There was no postmodern smarminess that we’d likely get in a 2022 version of the film, just pure sincerity. Hoskins’ performance told us these characters matter, this story matters.
Caine, does of course have more to work with on The Muppet Christmas Carol. Not just physically, with the puppets on the set, but with characters that had become beloved parts of popular consciousness since their debut in 1955. Though Caine plays Scrooge as the walking embodiment of the extremities of capitalism – a sort of Victorian Gordon Gekko – the emotional resonance is matched by an audience that adores the Muppets. Scrooge isn’t just mistreating Bob Cratchet, he’s mistreating Kermit the Frog too – and in the hierarchy of villainy, being cruel to cute green things is worse than being cruel to humans.
To a child, it’s a terrifying performance. Caine towers over the Muppets like a Kaiju rampaging over Tokyo, becoming a real spectre of evil, petrifying his little rat bookkeepers. The genius of Caine playing it as straight as he did in Get Carter is that is exactly how Scrooge would react to the Muppets. Scrooge was not a man who saw feelings or understood empathy, his world was one of numbers. So why would somebody who had shredded his humanity see these things as Muppets, puppets, or indeed anything other than a means to service his greed?
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Caine has built his career on charisma, sometimes turning down roles including the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy because they required him to be too nasty but here he dives to the depths of Scrooge’s pitifulness. Early on, Caine’s Scrooge purses at the very idea of Christmas, his demeanour colder than the snow falling on his top hat. He finds his smile thinking of the poverty of others. Played by everybody from Albert Finney to Patrick Stewart to Ross Kemp (yes, really), some actors can fall into the peril of making Scrooge either comically stolid or soft and grandfatherly, but Caine hones in on the blackheartedness of a character defined by his profession.
In a sense, the graveness of his wanton cruelty is a product of the time. Released just two years after Margaret Thatcher’s resignation from office and months on from the Conservatives securing yet another five years in office, the bleakness of Victorian England was not a mystical fantasy in 1992. The stone-faced attitude towards society’s vulnerable had defined British politics throughout the last decade, and it’s impossible not to see Britain’s first female Prime Minister in Caine’s stilted line delivery and icy glare.
As Scrooge is blitzed through his memories of Christmas, coming into contact with Marley and Marley aka Stadler and Waldorf aka David Cameron and George Osbourne, Caine begins to crack, his stubbornness melting away one wry joke at a time until he is reduced to a pitiful wreck, traumatised by the miser he has become. Caine has always been a self-aware actor but when he sees his own name on the gravestone, he turns into a rapture of snot and tears. He’s always had a face for a close-up but here we get one of his best, a defining image of what greed does to a man.
A Christmas Carol is a simple story, a moral fable on how it is better to be kind than selfish, and the Muppets version drives home the message with earnest clarity. Caine’s fear when first confronted by the ghosts of his former business partners is genuine, matched by his closing joy following the redemption of his soul. It is not saccharine or condescending, death and deceit are treated as seriously as they are in Dickens’ original text with Caine’s commanding performance making the entire thing possible. The humour hits, the emotional beats thump, and the message lands because of how convincing Caine is as Scrooge.
Caine has more great roles than virtually any other British actor. His filmography is basically a list of classics and evidence of his evolving talent – he found an entirely new legion of fans in his 70s as Alfred in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. But his depiction of Scrooge has become his most defining performance, replayed every Christmas for time infinity. It’s also a performance he loves himself, one of the few of his films he can share with his grandchildren. He’s Harry Palmer, Charlie Croker, Jack Carter. And he’s also Ebeneezer Scrooge. And it’s now impossible to imagine anybody else in the role.