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closeFriday, Nov. 06, 2009
Over-digitized 'Christmas Carol’ will leave you in a bah, humbug state of mind
Robert Zemeckis gives us a lump of coal with digitized, cold-looking 'A Christmas Carol.'
BY CHRISTOPHER KELLY
Could someone please pull Robert Zemeckis away from his computer?
The director of Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Cast Away once specialized in special effects-fueled fantasies that were infused with humanity. But beginning with The Polar Express (2004) and continuing with Beowulf (2007), Zemeckis became obsessed with a new form of computer animation that transforms human actors into digital cartoons. His latest, Disney’s A Christmas Carol, compounds the worst offenses of those previous efforts: The characters looks cold and alien, the story takes a back seat to the technological innovation, and there isn’t a hint of emotion to be found on the screen.
Jim Carrey plays Ebenezer Scrooge, Charles Dickens’ iconic crank who is visited by four spirits on Christmas Eve and compelled to change his coldhearted ways. That sounds like a clever bit of casting, but for most of the proceedings, the actor is straitjacketed. (Only late in the film, when Scrooge is shrunk to the size of a thimble by the Ghost of Christmas Future, do we get to witness any of Carrey’s elastic physicality.) Nor is Carrey much fun to look at, buried beneath old-man makeup and then digitized. Like most of the characters in the film — including Gary Oldman’s Bob Cratchit and Colin Firth’s Fred — Scrooge’s head is too big for his body, and his proportions seem all off. That’s the greatest perversion of Zemeckis’ style: He has spent hundreds of millions creating the ugliest children’s movies in modern memory.
The screenplay, also by Zemeckis, doesn’t tell a story so much as it just engages in a lot of antic activity. Remember the scene in The Polar Express where the train ticket falls out of the trail and goes racing through the air? A variation on that gets repeated here, oh, about a dozen times, as the camera soars over the rooftops of London, or Scrooge falls through the sky. The creative bankruptcy extends to the ghosts, who are rendered as a flickering candle (imagine a Conehead on fire), a red-headed giant (imagine a Scottish drag queen with chest hair) and a shadow (imagine a shadow). All three of them are played by Carrey, who is more creepy than comic.
I suppose there’s something to be said for the director’s use of 3-D, which creates an extraordinary depth of field within the auditorium. But only the techno-heads could possible care. The storytelling is herky-jerky, and Zemeckis never finds a way to make us feel invested in Scrooge’s quest for redemption.
The result is a movie that seems made for absolutely no one, other than Zemeckis himself.
There were numerous walkouts at the preview screening I attended this week. I predict many more once this madly ill-conceived and unpleasant movie arrives in theaters.
Rated PG (scary sequences), 95 min.
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