Movie Review: A Christmas Carol

Posted by sean in Movies, Reviews on November 9th, 2009

By Jesse Walvoord (11/7/09)

It is both fascinating and disappointing that a film about a man finding his soul could be so… well, soulless might be an extreme word, but upon viewing Robert Zemeckis’ new A Christmas Carol, one might find themselves questioning the film’s sincerity.

More filmed than any of Dickens’ other works, A Christmas Carol is most certainly a timeless story, here interpreted through “performance capture” CGI by Zemeckis, the foremost proponent and great architect of the medium.

It is for this methodology that the film will stand out among the other adaptations, and certainly why it will attract most of its attention.  And while the dead-eyed zombie tots of Zemeckis’ earlier The Polar Express are not quite gone, like Beowulf before it A Christmas Carol shows that progress continues to be made in achieving life-like performances from digital puppets.

The characters do move and exist very fluidly, with incredibly subtle mannerisms intact from the live performers.  The glassy eyes still elicit some unnerving lifelessness, but again, the effect is less than it has been.

Jim Carrey delivers a surprisingly subtle and nuanced vocal performance as Scrooge, channeling the arch-bitterness of Alastair Sim while occasionally indulging in the wacky helplessness of Bill Murray.  But the comparisons do not quite do him his justice.  Carrey is most certainly in tune with this character and that integrity shows through the countless billions of ones and zeroes.  His physical mannerisms, as interpreted by the computer artists, are suitably restrained.

The supporting performances lend much to the film.  Bob Hoskins can be easily counted on to provide jolly frivolity, while Colin Firth is as charming and affable in digital form as he tends to be in the flesh.  Gary Oldman does fine work as always, and yet his Bob Cratchit is marred by a rather horrifying, imp-ish character design that I’m at a loss to explain.

The rest of the film, in terms of its visuals, is rather incredible.  The film’s designers spare no effort or expense in giving us a vivid, expansive Victorian England – one almost reaches out to touch the iced-over surface of a gloomy store-window, or puts a hand out to grasp at the warmth from a gas-lamp.

But this isn’t where the movie’s problems lie.

The script adheres very strictly to Dickens’ text in a very literal sense.  But it veers away from the source where, perhaps, it matters most.  There are no glaring changes or omissions in plot or character, but – whereas Dickens’ tale was of a man discovering his soul and gaining redemption – Zemeckis’ take on Scrooge’s spiritual epiphany is more of the fire-and-brimstone variety.  His Scrooge doesn’t learn to cherish his own humanity, he is simply threatened with death and damnation unless he leaves behind his crotchety persona.

Where’s the Christmas miracle in that?

What is added to the script is action, in the form of rollercoaster action sequences that see Scrooge tossed about by his ghostly guides into one dizzying (and completely unmotivated) 3-D chase after another.  While visually intricate, these sequences fail to thrill because they are so detached from whatever story momentum had been building previous to them.  That they exist merely to distract the kiddies, and to show off Zemeckis’ digital playground, is painfully obvious.

Other digital elements are similarly problematic.  The digital characters’ resemblance to their performers continues to be a distracting contradiction; why bother creating a photo-real version of an actor when you can just point a camera at them?

The answer is so that Zemeckis does not have to contend with, what he phrases the “tyranny of production.”

While freeing the cinema from physical and practical entrapments has and often shows much potential for great leaps of imagination, in this case it merely shows that Zemeckis – once the great humanist of blockbuster cinema – would rather deal with pixels than people.  That the film so often misses the humanist intent of Dickens’ book is hardly a surprise when taken in this context.

So if soulless is too strong a term, perhaps then at least “cynical” might do.

If you come for magic of the digital sort, you’re unlikely to be disappointed.  Yet any other magic is, unfortunately, left out in the cold.

Humbug.

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