Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has always been one of my favorite trappings of the holiday season. It’s a dark tale, but it is forged in the fires of a desire for hope and redemption that burns brightly in every human heart. It speaks to the truths of charity and forgiveness that glow dimly throughout the rest of the year, but faithfully come into focus every Christmas season.
Dickens’ novel has been committed to film and television so often that it now seems more like an eternal archetype. For any adaptation to be successful – especially one of such ubiquitous material – it must either bring something new to the genre, boil it down to its true and singular essence, or unabashedly tell the tale as it was originally meant to be told, complete with lavish detail and a determination to exclude any modern sense of irony.
It’s here that Robert Zemeckis’ latest take on A Christmas Carol ultimately falters. Rather than focusing on one approach, this adaptation tries to remain faithful to Dickens’ original vision (almost to a fault) while at the same time adding strange embellishments and odd eccentricities that continue to plague the production throughout, making the whole affair feel awkward and forced.
The effect is wildly inconsistent, resulting in a house of cards divided against itself, reeling aimlessly from uncompromising realism to cartoonish excess. One moment we might recoil in horror, disgust, and pity before the ghost of Scrooge’s business partner Marley, but in the next we are expected to laugh at some juvenile sight gag.
The computer generated animation is likewise uneven. There’s such an attention to detail that it seems some of the most basic things – like animating realistic human movement – were cast aside, unnoticed and neglected. At other times, Zemeckis appears to willfully disregard the verisimilitude of his design and indulge in bizarre bits of Looney Tunes tomfoolery. It’s all very strange, really.
Jim Carrey, who played not only Ebenezer Scrooge but all three Ghosts of Christmas as well, is partially to blame, although his contributions are not as disastrous as I feared. While his patented inanity is mostly kept in check, he still overacts when subtlety and nuance might have served better. His portrayal of the Ghost of Christmas Past is particularly heavy handed and outlandish and his redemption as Scrooge is not nearly as powerful or as touching as I had hoped.
Zemeckis’ transparent efforts to wow the audience with obvious 3-D magic tricks do nothing but harm to the film as a whole. Objects fly at the screen and characters jump out of the darkness far too often. There’s an entire sequence toward the end that serves no other purpose but to carry the audience away on a virtual roller coaster ride. I can’t imagine how this movie can hold up on DVD, with such a small screen for a canvas. While I’m not recommending that you see it, if you feel you must, be sure to see it in 3-D – I just don’t think it works otherwise.
Parents with young children may want to steer clear of this particular Christmas story. A Christmas Carol has always been a bit on the creepy side, and this latest incarnation doesn’t shy away from any grim details. In fact, at times, Zemeckis seems to relish in the horror-lite trappings, indulging in a handful of startling jump scenes, a smattering of gross-out bits, and few sequences of drawn out suspense that might have your young ones cowering in the aisles. Death and the threat of eternal damnation – let the good times roll.
Robert Zemeckis has given birth to a schizophrenic beast wrought with unnecessary inconsistencies that essentially deprive it of any audience. The film is too scary for kids, but too silly for adults. Its devotion to the original text and its arcane language will likely be lost on your children, but parents won’t be able to enjoy its gravity, seeing as it is so inharmoniously coupled with such bizarre and incongruous embellishments.
While Alan Silvestri’s sweeping score is undeniably grand and while I must admit that the story hits all the right notes on queue and the film moves at quite a quick clip, nothing can save this sinking ship from its icy grave of mediocrity.
Caution Rating: 5
