Lump of Carrey coal
A Christmas Carol / Robert Zemeckis’s first foray into motion capture CGI didn’t go too well with The Polar Express. The humans looked lifeless and their eyes were dead; as Simon Cowell would describe it, they were like fish on a slab. His next feature, Beowulf, was a marked improvement, mostly because it was a rousing adult adventure with bloody dismemberment, Crispin Glover as Grendal and Angelina Jolie slithering around naked. His latest bit of yuletide animated experimentation, A Christmas Carol, is the director’s best effort yet with the technology, but storywise, the movie is a huge step back again.
It’s the familiar Victorian tale of how the miserly Scrooge is infused with the Christmas spirit, and the main character’s face is especially detailed, with wrinkles, raw patches of reddened skin, whiskers, and other stray hairs dotting his protruding snout. Once again, the 3-D effects are a mostly superfluous marketing gimmick from greedy studios; surprisingly though, the snow here looks fantastic. Individual flakes come straight at you when the wind blows. Unfortunately, this is the only time the 3-D actually impresses.
Most perplexing is how unremittingly dark this movie is, especially coming from Disney and aimed at kids. Even the subversive and divisive Scrooged with Bill Murray had some sort of joyful glint in its malevolent eye during its most macabre of Dickensian moments, but here, we see elements that would’ve given even Tim Burton pause. Scrooge’s deceased business partner Marley (and as we later see, the other restless spirits destined to haunt the earth for eternity) are held by the chains of their past wrongs in a costume that looks like a cross between an ethereal design by Clive Barker mixed with a contraption from Saw. Marley himself manages to unhinge his decaying jaw–completely off. Suffice to say, parents may have to splurge for a bigger present this year to make up for traumatizing the more sensitive members of their families.
The main problem with this adaptation, though, is how little of the new, or unexpected, it brings to the familiar tale. Nothing truly surprises and it’s simply an excuse for Carrey to bludgeon us with his different voices (he does all three Christmas ghosts). Only the Ghost of Christmas Past is truly original. The spirit seems to be a ghostly candle with a wispy, expressive, rubbery, and vaguely effeminate face. When he occasionally twitches his head to one side in a sort of stoned spasm, the effect is genuine humor of the absurdly bizarre. Unfortunately, the film relies mostly on Carrey endlessly bellowing while falling from such great heights. A little of that goes a long way.
One still wishes Zemeckis would return to live-action. After all, this was the man responsible for Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Romancing the Stone. (Then again, he also gave us Forrest Gump, Contact, and Cast Away.) Get ready, a cheap shot is about to be lobbed but A Christmas Carol deserves it: Bah Humbug!
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