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Movie Review: A Christmas Carol
Scrooge Brought Back With Latest Technology
By Maggie Scott
Walt Disney Pictures and director Robert Zemeckis have blessed us everyone with a new film version of the timeless Charles Dickens’ literary classic, A Christmas Carol. But, it’s a mixed blessing.
As a universally relevant and richly adaptive story of human redemption, the work has been set in eras and places other than 19th century London and seen its hero, Ebenezer Scrooge, in many different guises. In today’s highly-charged climate of displeasure with the financial sector of our country, the story might have been set this time on Wall Street to great effect.
But, writer Zemeckis has chosen to stay faithful in his script adaptation of the novel to how Dickens told Scrooge’s story in words, character and setting; and, instead, has turned to two cinematic technologies-—one new, one old—to offer a newfangled way in which Scrooge and his world appear to the moviegoer.
Zemeckis has had a long-standing interest in new technology and been willing to risk featuring it as an element of his story telling—not always to critical approval—in such films as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her, the Back to the Future trilogy and Forrest Gump. Here, he combines the new process, “performance capture” (formerly known as “motion capture”), and the old process, 3-D.
Recent films like Polar Express and Beowulf have featured performance capture; and the 3-D format seems to be everywhere these days, particularly in children’s films. Unfortunately, England’s own answer to the Grinch fares both ill and well in his new CGI permutation.
Jim Carrey is an inspired choice to portray Scrooge, and his performance “capture” is intensely engaging, with no lapses into out-of-character, joshing twitches. The opening scenes of Scrooge at a coffin maker’s disposing of the body of his partner, Jacob Marley, are especially compelling; fixing this rendition of Scrooge as one to be reckoned with. This proves to be the up and down side of the movie.
While there is thrilling satisfaction to engage once more with this miser in his mixed world of Yuletide merriment and dark need, there is a sense of short shrift to those characters and events that are a crucial element of telling Scrooge’s story—from his detachment from basic human decency and charity in his “honest pursuit of substance” to his Christmas Eve redemption.
The tyranny of 3-D will occasionally manipulate Scrooge into actions and situations irrelevant and untrue to both the form and substance of Dickens’ work. Also the performance capture format has the unfortunate effect of rendering most of the supporting characters’ faces, particularly the eyes, into something approaching the soullessness of a zombie.
More care is taken with Carrey’s eyes; and Scrooge is more or less consistently vivid, whether harassing his long-suffering clerk, Bob Cratchit (Gary Oldman), scattering cheery carolers off snow-crusted sidewalks, or confronting in bewildered dread, defiance and dismay his spectral, this-is-your-life-and-death guides.
Disney can rest assured that this screen version of Dickens’ masterpiece will claim its rightful place among cherished traditions of Christmases past, present and future. Rated PG for scary sequences and images.
