According to Deadline, Paramount has dropped the first full trailer for "Ebenezer," the Ti West-directed Dickens adaptation starring Johnny Depp as Scrooge, in theaters November 13. The film was already promoted in person last July, when Depp appeared in full Scrooge costume in a studio-built 1880s Christmas village in San Diego's Gaslamp district before crashing a Comic-Con panel in Hall H.
The Method Mumble is no longer a red carpet anecdote. It has a release date, and the trailer is what the call sheet promises: "very period, very dark gothic as you'd expect a Ti West title to be." Scrooge sinks in a bed, throws snow balls at a couple, and beams at the camera, "It's good to be back," while the opening credits roll a montage of every alter ego Depp has ever played. Jack Sparrow. Edward Scissorhands. Which, as Deadline puts it, "have led to this."
The mumble is the whole story, though. At the panel, Depp hobbled onstage with a candle ("I'm speaking into the candle"), handed it to John Francis Daley, and told the crowd, "Have you no lives? No responsibilities?" The July street appearance: Deadline. Deadline was standing "less than 12 feet in front of him" that day, and its verdict covers the whole run: "Depp is so method, you can't even make out what he is saying, in complete mumble."
Here is the mechanism. The star is promoting a holiday movie about a miser who must learn to talk to the people around him, and he is doing it by turning the talking off. That is not a method. That is a closed channel. As he left the street in July, he quietly said "Humbug" to a crowd that had waited an hour. The studio's own note: no actors, no footage, just "zag then zig."
Behind the mumble sits Ian McKellen, Rupert Grint, Sam Claflin and Daisy Ridley, and a Dickens adaptation by Nathaniel Halpern. A strong cast to orbit a lead who, by all accounts, will refuse to be intelligible for two hours. The tagline from the official trailer is "The name you know. The story you don't." The story, apparently, is the mumble.
YOUR TURN: How much of a performance is a closed mouth?
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