Quotes of the Day
When journalists propose a story, their editors ask them: Why this? and Why now? The same demands might be made of Robert Zemeckis' choice of a new film. Why A Christmas Carol? It's not that the Charles Dickens' tale, first published in 1843, is unknown to the reading or viewing audience. Event by event, word for word — all 28,723 of them, from "Marley was dead" to "God Bless Us, Every One" — this might be the most familiar of all stories, including the Gospels. Aside from millions of parent-to-child readings, the Scrooge saga has been done as an opera and an operetta and in countless little-theater versions. In the '90s, Patrick Stewart memorized and declaimed the whole thing on Broadway; the audience could have recited huge chunks along with him.
The movies got to A Christmas Carol as early as 1901, and television in an experimental broadcast in 1943. Scrooge has been played by Reginald Owen (for MGM in 1938), the great Alastair Sim (in a 1951 film known alternately as Scrooge or A Christmas Carol), Albert Finney (in a 1970 musical version) and Michael Caine (with the Muppets) on the big screen, and by John Carradine, Ralph Richardson, Fredric March, George C. Scott and country star Hoyt Axton on the small. The story was worked into episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man (they called it A Bionic Christmas Carol) and Blackadder. Among the dozen or so animated adaptations are ones starring Mr. Magoo and Mickey Mouse — with Scrooge McDuck, of course, in the lead role and Goofy (a stretch) as Marley's Ghost. In 1988 Bill Murray did a splendid update, Scrooged, and just last year David Zucker directed a right-wing burlesque, An American Carol, whose Scrooge figure bore a passing resemblance to Michael Moore.
So Zemeckis' answer to Why this? could be Why not? Everyone else has done it. But the writer-director's prime motive, in the movie his sponsors have named Disney's A Christmas Carol, was to apply his favorite toy, the animated live-action technique known as performance capture, to the Dickens chestnut. He used it for The Polar Express and Beowulf. Now he could hire Jim Carrey to play not only the man who stares at ghosts but the three visiting spirits: Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, each character given a distinct, cartoonish size and personality. Performance capture is meant to allow actors the freedom of interpretation on a bare stage; the backgrounds, whether Scrooge & Marley's accounting firm or a vast cityscape of London by night, are created later by CGI artists.
And what about Why now? Not now as in, why release A Christmas Carol seven weeks before Dec. 25? In the past decade or so, early Nov. has become the industry's launch time for Christmas tales: The Santa Clause and its sequels, Fred Claus, all manner of Clauses without a cause. No, the question is about the contemporary relevance of Dickens' tale. Well, Zemeckis may not have planned it this way — he surely began his project before the onslaught of the Great Recession — but, in the current climate, this fable for all times is a fable for our time. I mean right now, when Wall Street money-lenders, Scrooges in Armani suits, multiply their stash and breed Ignorance and Want in the surplus population.
The new film is also a ghost story, a bustling action-adventure and an example of the comedy tour-de-farce, in which the star validates his virtuosity by appearing in a plethora of funny disguises. Complementing Carrey's four-part gallery, Gary Oldman multitasks as mousy Bob Cratchit, a ferocious Marley's Ghost and — ah, the wonders of effects technology — Tiny Tim. While the 3-D gimcrackery should keep the kids happy, Carrey's knack for finding character within caricature makes this an experience that probes and touches as much as it pokes and nudges.
With such films as Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump, Zemeckis earned his rep as an uber-techie plundering the medium's resources for making fantasy look real. An incorrigible showman, he seems to think that what A Christmas Carol really needed was for Scrooge to be turned into a tiny creature, hounded by a hearthside rat, and the addition of a few elaborate chase sequences; the movie a bit too often plays like Mr. Scrooge's Wild Ride.
No matter, for he has vividly imagined the London landscape — alternately holiday-card and horror-film — and the specters who visit Scrooge. Christmas Past is an ethereal candle, Present a rollicking giant, a 10-ft. Christmas tree in more or less human form, and Yet to Come a phantom with eight-ball eyes. Like the Owen and Sim versions, the Zemeckis script sticks pretty closely to the text; virtually every word comes from Dickens. That helps connect the 19th-century London of grand wealth and grotesque poverty to the America of today, and allows Dickens's vigorous social conscience to speak to us with the political urgency of an editorial in The Nation. Most pointed is the movie's visualizing of the metaphorical creatures Ignorance and Want — children who fester into killers and prostitutes — which lands us briefly into the Dickens underworld of Oliver Twist and Hard Times.
The definitive Scrooge remains Alistair Sim's in the 1951 British film. (Carrey must think so; he frequently channels the pernicious glee Sim put into Scrooge's miserliness.) But why not take a look at the Disney-Zemeckis-Carrey version? It's an ideal start-up to Christmas 2009 — if you can afford the ticket.
- Richard Corliss