Movie Review - Disney's A Christmas Carol

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First and foremost, people need to know that this is a ghost story.  Don’t forget that the original title of the Charles Dickens classic was A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.  Decades of diluted adaptations featuring the likes The Jetsons, Elmo and Xena: Warrior Princess have caused people to forget just how macabre this story actually is.  And, seeing as how it stars Jim Carrey and has the “Disney” logo plastered on every piece of marketing material, it would be easy to believe that Disney’s A Christmas Carol would be yet another in a long line of watered-down takes on the holiday classic.  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Directed by Robert Zemeckis the film marks his third consecutive directorial effort using motion capture animation (the previous two being Beowulf and The Polar Express).   This film illustrates that Zemeckis is getting quite adept with the new technology.  The creepy emotionless expressions of The Polar Express are all but gone and he’s become comfortable enough with motion capture that he no longer feels compelled to overwhelm our senses with every frame of footage.  That’s not to say the film doesn’t utilize the technology effectively.  The film opens with a dizzying tracking shot above and through the streets of 19^th century London, going places (and getting there) in ways that no normal camera ever could.  And the Victorian England that we so often associate with Christmas has been painstakingly recreated in detail so meticulous it would make any historian proud.  There were times when I wished we could pause the film merely so we could take a walking tour through the snow-covered streets of a bygone era.  One of my biggest complaints about the recent spate of 3D movies is that the glasses required to render the effect inevitably end up reducing the brightness of the colors.  This film is no exception.  However, Victorian England was a dark place.  The Industrial Revolution was in full-swing and air pollution was rampant.  Plus, electric lighting did not yet exist; most illumination was created via lamps and candles.  Therefore, the film comes by its darkness honestly.  It’s more a commitment to historical accuracy than it is a byproduct of 3D glasses.

I’ve never been much of a fan of Carrey.  I typically find his performances too manic.  Ironically, being animated seems to have toned down his…well, animation.  He’s, thankfully, not his usual blend of exaggerated expressions and hyperactive tics.  Instead, his take on Scrooge is a bit more nuanced.  Granted, it’s difficult to humanize a character whose very name has literally become a synonym for a miserly killjoy.  But he manages to humanize the character more than expected.  If only the people behind motion capture would jettison the gimmick of having one actor play multiple parts.  Carrey plays EIGHT different characters: Scrooge, Ghost of Christmas Past, Ghost of Christmas Present, Ghost of Christmas Yet-To-Come, Scrooge as a young boy, Scrooge as a young man and Scrooge as a middle-age man.  While it’s interesting that the technology allows one actor to play the same character at various ages, seeing one actor as multiple characters generally feels hokey. 

Zemeckis is credited with the screenplay but, given how much of the dialog is lifted directly from the book, I believe the film could just as easily credit “Cut” and “Paste.”  And I mean that in a good way.  The story itself is surprisingly, remarkably, blessedly faithful to its source material.  Hard as it is to believe, this could quite possibly be the most faithful retelling of the story ever brought to the screen.  While the commercials go to great lengths in order to make the film appear to be an action-packed comedy, the moments featured have been cherry-picked to make the movie seem a bit more kid-friendly than it actually is.  This is not a kid’s movie.  It’s not that there’s anything “inappropriate” in the movie.  But it’s a dark film both literally (as mentioned above) and figuratively.  The ghost of Jacob Marley (Gary Oldman), Scrooge’s former business partner, is rendered as the rotting the corpse he is (though he mercifully appears to be in the earlier stages of decomposition rather than later stages that he should actually be in).  The film is a ghost story and it never strays too far afield from that premise.  This fact, combined with some Dickensian dialog that can be a bit stilted (not to mention a touch arcane) when being said aloud, might make the film problematic for some younger and/or less than patient filmgoers.  But beyond that, A Christmas Carol is that rare thing: a Christmas movie we might still be watching in twenty years.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Scrooge and 1 being An All Dogs Christmas Carol, A Christmas Carol gets an 8.

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