Review Essay:
Of all the adaptations of Dickens’s iconic novella, I think it’s possible that the Robert Zemeckis-directed, motion-capture animated, Jim-Carrey-as-Scrooge-and-also-half-the-cast movie I’m writing about today has the widest possible gap between how I ought to feel and how I end up feeling. This movie has so much going for it: Zemeckis clearly wants to vividly realize 1840s London while not shying away from the creepier and more unsettling elements in the frightening ghost story that A Christmas Carol can and arguably even “should” be, in the right hands. Zemeckis committed early on to a really faithful adaptation, and it’s certainly true that the film’s dialogue is often lifted right out of Dickens, and that it depicts some moments and scenes so obscure that even my beloved Muppets didn’t attempt them. I’ve loved more than a few Robert Zemeckis movies, over the years, and while Carrey can be an acquired taste, I’ve loved him in enough films that a Jim Carrey star vehicle is, if anything, a plus in my book. It all sounds fantastic to me. And yet. This film is a disaster of epic proportions, as far as I’m concerned. It’s unpleasant to look at, unevenly paced to the point of putting the audience through theatrical whiplash, and ultimately it feels dramatically and emotionally inert in the moments where it most needs to inspire feeling. I can’t believe a movie with this much going for it is this unendurably awful.
So much of this film’s problem is in the animation, which was lambasted even at the time for feeling well below the standard needed for a movie made on a $200 million budget. My notes from the movie’s opening sequences include phrases like “this feels like a DVD main menu” and “for a video game cutscene, the animation is okay.” These are not the kind of plaudits $200 million dollars ought to buy you. One of the big challenges with the technology Zemeckis was using is that he could get close enough to a depiction of the actor’s real faces that they no longer seem like animation…but not so close that they feel real. The result is that when someone like Scrooge’s nephew Fred enters, I can’t see either an actor or a character: I see the undead, shambling form of a Colin Firth clone, stumbling out of the uncanny valley and onto the screen with eyes as cold and lifeless as a supermarket fish. The animation handles physical structures a lot more successfully—my favorite shot in the whole movie occurs very early on as the camera swoops up from Scrooge at street level to fly from his office in Whitechapel over the City of London towards St. Paul’s. It’s evocative and immersive and a cool way to situate me in London and in that moment in time. But of course A Christmas Carol is a movie about the heart, about people and the way we learn to care about them as people. If your movie’s aesthetics are so tortured that I cringe every time a character fully faces the screen, you are kicking me out of the parts of the movie you really need me to lean into.
There’s a knock-on effect from the animation style, too, since one of the arguments Zemeckis always made in favor of mo-cap animation is that it allows you to cast a brilliant actor in more than one part, even allowing someone to share the screen with themselves naturally. There may be ways to do this skillfully, but here I think it almost always hurts the viewing experience. I get that you CAN make it so that Gary Oldman (an acclaimed and award-winning actor) not only plays the role of Bob Cratchit but also of his son, Tiny Tim, but…why? Gary’s a talented fellow, but even if he wasn’t miscast as Cratchit (and I think he really is), seeing the features of his middle-aged face dimly recognizable on the elfin features of seven year old Tiny Tim is ghastly and unsettling. The original plan had been to let Oldman voice the role of Tim also, but my understanding is the result was so unsuccessful that at the last minute they swapped in child actors to speak the lines. And I’ll admit that there’s something kind of interesting about letting Jim Carrey play Scrooge at every age…but casting him as all three Spirits, also? And then having Carrey, an actor never known or celebrated for his accent work, learn three DIFFERENT British accents to differentiate Scrooge from Christmas Past and Christmas Present, none of them skilfully or naturally achieved? You’re making problems for yourself that you didn’t even need to create, Robert. What on earth are you doing?
There are things for me to praise in even this shambolic a production, and I’ll pause for a paragraph to try to do so. As I mentioned, Zemeckis does want to keep in the unsettling elements in Dickens’s novella, and I like the ones he includes for the most part—the ghosts Scrooge sees as Marley leaves him, haunted by their inability to help those in need. The scrawny, almost inhuman forms of Ignorance and Want, clutching to the robes of Christmas Present at the end of that sequence. Some of the shadow work with Yet to Come is pretty effectively creepy, too. And honestly, Carrey may be one of the better Scrooges I’ve seen dancing around on Christmas morning: it’s maybe the only point in the movie that Jim seems to be relaxing and letting some of his silliness onto the screen, which to me is what you pay the man millions of dollars to achieve. After an hour of listening to a guy sound like he’s white-knuckling his way through every line, looking at a pronunciation guide so that he keeps his Yorkshire accent and his Irish brogue from blending into each other, it’s a relief to feel like Carrey can breathe out for a moment and just cavort in his weightless, rubber band animated body.
The weightless, rubber band quality’s a problem, of course, but it’s a problem for a lot of CGI animation of the era. It disrupts your ability to connect with a scene when it’s suddenly apparent that what you’re looking at has no mass or substance. The greater problem here is the weightlessness of the camera also, and therefore what Zemeckis does with it. He feels like a director so excited for all the things mo-cap could do that live-action couldn’t do that he never stopped to ask himself why he would choose to do it. Like, you CAN have Christmas Yet to Come chase Scrooge through the streets of London in a hearse pulled by demon horses until Scrooge magically shrinks (mechanism unexplained) so that he can scamper down drain pipes to safety…but why are you doing that? You can make it so that, when you have Scrooge attempt to “snuff out” the light atop Christmas Past’s head (a moment that, I have to acknowledge, does occur in the book….sort of, though Zemeckis’s Christmas Past doesn’t look at all like the character Dickens described), the spirit and extinguisher turn into a fireworks rocket that zooms Scrooge helplessly into the night air above London before he plummets to his “death”, waking up by hitting the hard wooden floor of his bedroom…but should you? A lot of these sequences are elaborate and lengthy with impossible camera moves, and they add nothing at all to the story…but taking the time and energy to animate them means that other things are left undeveloped, like the relationships of any of these characters to each other. For a movie that professes to be a “faithful adaptation”, there’s no emotional fidelity here: it’s hard to believe that Scrooge cares about any of the people he’s seeing, since most of the scenes fly by quickly in order to set up the next strangely paced setpiece.
I could write about the movie’s wobbles for pages and pages, but I’ll try to focus on a couple of examples that tell maybe the whole story of what falls apart here. Zemeckis makes the strange (and, to me, inexplicable) choice of having almost all of the Christmas Present sequence unfold with Scrooge and the spirit sitting in his room, looking through a transparent floor at scenes the spirit shows him. For a movie that otherwise is maybe too immersive (dragging me down drainpipes, etc.), the decision not to immerse Scrooge in these scenes more fully when they are literally the joyous encounters with humanity that break open his heart in this classic and beloved story is baffling. It leaves us, in a sense, watching Scrooge and Christmas Present watch something on their own screen: no wonder the characters and their experiences end up feeling emotionally remote. And while the opening aerial shot of London is pretty impressive, in later scenes I often felt like establishing shots were panning across landscapes that had been copy-pasted, with identical houses or windows repeated over and over. It wouldn’t take much work to help me see even a set of genuinely architecturally identical row houses as having some character and life of their own, but the movie doesn’t think it needs to do the work. And that’s really how Zemeckis treats the Dickens elements in his script, too: he thinks he can copy and paste chunks out of the novella without thinking about how, in the medium of film, he has work to do to bring them to life, to give them character, even, yes, adding your own interesting flourishes in an attempt to help communicate the themes of this story to the audience that’s come looking for them. It’s a big world and there’s someone out there who loves this film—maybe even you—and if so, I think it will only be because they can get past the animation itself, and find underneath it the really good bones of Dickens’s original novella. That’s the beauty of even a bad Christmas Carol adaptation, and it’s about all the beauty I’m finding here, I’m afraid.
I Know That Voice and Possibly That Hideous Simulacrum of a Face: Part of Zemeckis’s shtick with this film, again, is casting actors in multiple parts because he could, so the cast is surprisingly small given the length of the credits. Daryl Sabara, who plays five credited roles (including two different carolers and Peter Cratchit), has a voice we might recognize from when, at a younger age, he fills the central role in The Polar Express, another haunting mo-cap animated film from the fevered brain of Robert Zemeckis—a role titled simply “Hero Boy” in the credits of that film. Sabara’s a real veteran of varied types of seasonal projects, in fact: he voices Tommy in Scooby-Doo: 13 Spooky Tales – Holiday Thrills and Chills, and he appears in the music video for Meghan Trainor’s Christmas song, “My Kind of Present,” due to the fact that Sabara is in fact Trainor’s husband in real life. Julian Holloway, who in this movie appears as “Fat Cook”, “Businessman #3,” and “Portly Gentleman #2” (which I believe is a speaking role, soliciting Scrooge for funds), had a long career, mostly on British television. I know Holloway from a few episodes of the unjustly forgotten series about a 1940s radio station, Remember WENN, but I don’t believe he made a Christmas episode there—he is, however, a voice in Toot and Puddle: I’ll Be Home for Christmas, and as one of the repertory cast of actors who seem to have appeared in almost every installment of the long-running Carry On… series, he has a couple of small roles in the 1973 British TV special, Carry On Christmas.
I know, I know, I’m wasting your time with actors you barely hear and films you’ve never heard of: isn’t that the fun of this section, though? I just sat through Robert Zemeckis’s body horror holiday screamfest—let a man have a little fun, okay? All right fine, let’s deal with the big guns. Cary Elwes, who here is credited with five parts but is probably most recognizable as “Portly Gentleman #1” is of course a reliable hand in a fair number of holiday films, including Last Train to Christmas, A Castle for Christmas, and Black Christmas, as well as a small part in the Garry Marshall anthology film New Year’s Eve. Whether you wanted to recognize him or not, you had to come to terms with the eerie visage of Colin Firth in the role of nephew Fred. Firth, as you may well know, plays Jamie the writer and bumbling romantic in Love Actually, and while it would barely qualify even by my relaxed definition at FTTH, I do think I should mention that the King’s radio Christmas address plays a small but important part in The King’s Speech, in which Firth of course stars as King George VI. And of course our star, Jim Carrey, appearing in no less than EIGHT separate credited roles in this animated monstrosity, is the green title character in Dr. Seuss’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas, which will make an appearance on the blog later this year.
Spirit of Christmas Carol Present: Whatever else I say about it, I certainly think it’s important to acknowledge that the screenplay includes a number of things most adaptations omit, including young Ebenezer’s conversation with his sister Fan, the quirky finale to the Christmas Past sequence in which Scrooge “snuffs out” the Spirit (or attempts to), and as aforementioned the haunting encounter near the end of the Christmas Present sequence involving the gaunt children, Ignorance and Want.
Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent: Despite its apparent commitment to detail, there are some moments I wish the film would have included (or rather, I’d wish it if I didn’t find the film hard to watch): we get his estrangement from Belle but not his later vision of her as a happily married woman. The Cratchit sequence in the Yet to Come portion of the movie is missing the longer conversation Bob has regarding the generosity of Scrooge’s nephew and the job secured for Peter, his son. And while in the novella, Christmas Present takes Scrooge through a really wonderful montage of happy Christmas scenes, this motion picture doesn’t take the time to do it (which is a real shame, since honestly that kind of thing is probably the best deployment of the Zemeckis animation approach’s strengths).
Christmas Carol Vibes (10/10): I don’t think I can fairly ding this thing in both categories for its utter inability to connect me to the emotions of the original story, so I’m leaving those deductions for the quality score. And in terms of “how fully does this present the original Dickens work,” I just can’t fault the intentions of the thing: Zemeckis wants to bring as much as possible off of the page and onto the screen, and it’s a remarkably comprehensive representation of the text. The streets of London feel pretty glorious on the rare moments we’re in them to any useful purpose, and had Zemeckis cracked the mo-cap animation thing, maybe it could have been a really great visualization of the novella.
Actual Quality (4.5/10): Zemeckis didn’t crack the mo-cap animation thing. And honestly even if he had, I have concerns here: bad casting choices, bad pacing (the opening scene at Marley’s coffin feels interminable), and bad instincts regarding when to innovate and when not to go an inch beyond the text of the Dickens original. It’s not morally reprehensible, and I have to acknowledge that there’s more talent on the screen here than with a couple of last year’s really lamentable films, so I’m leaving it a notch above the worst stuff I’ve watched for FFTH. But it’s not much better than those movies are, and I struggled to finish it on my one viewing.
Scrooge? Badly miscast, poor Jim Carrey just can’t land the accents he’s being asked to land, especially given cartoonish choices made about his voice and appearance (at least partly if not wholly by the director) that limit his ability to seem grounded in the reality of the film. He’s best at Scrooge’s giddiness, but he spends most of his time shaking his way through simulations of emotions he can’t really convey, whether that’s a limitation of his skills as an actor or just the medium he’s trying to apply them in. I’d rather not blame him as an actor, though, other than for the hubris of agreeing to all the parts Zemeckis wanted him to play: it would have been hard enough to get him ready to play any one of the roles he’s cast in, and there’s no sense here that anybody tried hard enough. Honestly, I wish they’d executed a swap on set: I think Oldman could have handled Scrooge and the Spirits with greater skill, and I can see Jim’s more elastic and youthful face being at least a little less creepy on Tiny Tim (and that energy being a better fit for light-hearted Bob Cratchit than Gary Oldman is).
Supporting Cast? Again, these were surprising flops: Firth and Oldman are experienced and gifted actors, but neither of them really settles into the roles they’re given, likely in part because the technology is standing in the way of their full range of expression (I assume). Firth doesn’t convey any real sense of who Fred is—larger than life or just lively; sweet-tempered or simple—and to the extent that I understand Oldman’s attempts at Cratchit, I’d say he was trying to play him like Scrooge’s nervous heir more than like the clerk we know pretty well from other versions. If either of them were trying to do something creative and new, it’s getting lost somewhere in the digital sauce. I’d say the best performance on screen might well be Bob Hoskins as Fezziwig, and that’s because Fezziwig (both in the novella and even more so here) is really written as a cartoon character, so that his outlandish behavior and his elastic face and body feel correct in his surroundings on screen.
Recommended Frequency? It’s so disturbing, folks. It’s so incredibly disconcerting. It’s also so faithful to many of the original scenes on a basic structural level that I ought to get a kick out of it, but the faces are creepy to look at, and every non-Dickens move the screenplay makes is a mistake, and the role of Scrooge is so central to the story that miscasting it gives away half of what little hope remained for success. I’d try it once at most, if I were you, and with low expectations even then: you’ll know inside of ten minutes whether you’re more comfortable with the animation work than I am.
Obviously if you decide to give it a whirl, this Disney movie is only streaming for free on Disney+, though I was surprised to learn that it’s available for rent from basically every outlet you’d think of renting from. Maybe they’re still trying to pay off that $200,000,000 budget. If you want to buy it on disc, you can, and if you want to check it out at your local library, it looks like a couple thousand of them own it (and my guess is that, in most of them, it’s still on the shelf for checkout right now, even at Christmastime). Have as much fun as you can, and if you’re not having fun, get out early.
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