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This Film On

Disney's A Christmas Carol

(2009)

96 min. Buena Vista Pictures Distribution. Director: Robert Zemeckis. Cast: Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Bob Hoskins, Colin Firth, Robin Wright Penn.

In Disney's A Christmas Carol, fabulously detailed digital sets bring Dickensian London to life. But it is not buildings that make us feel something. Nor is it showy, swooping, impossible "camera moves" and other trickery made possible by digital animation and motion-capture technologies. If an audience is to feel something from A Christmas Carol, the emphasis must be on hurt, hardship, pain, fear, sincerity, good cheer and, above all, love. Fear excepted, most of these emotions seem like afterthoughts in Robert Zemeckis' new adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic.

In personally adapting Dickens' novella, Zemeckis has written a mostly faithful, lean, tough-minded script that retains the essential shape of Ebenezer Scrooge's redemptive story arc. Cold-hearted usurer Scrooge abandoned a chance at true love for what he calls "the honest pursuit of substance." Money is a lover that will never question him and—due to his avid penny-pinching—never leave him. But when a series of ghosts visits him, Scrooge systematically faces the best and worst of his past, the patheticness of his present, and the cruel end that is his future. Only by hitting bottom can the old man discover he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by being generous and open-hearted.

The problem here isn't the story—which is essentially unbreakable; it's in the storytelling, which too often comes across as rote. Horror fan Zemeckis connects most with the passages detailing the hauntings of Scrooge. Zemeckis' scary theatrics and sharp timing effectively create suspense as we await the ghosts—but don't maintain tension once when they show up and turn Scrooge's home into the Hanuted Mansion on steroids. Unfortunately, Zemeckis is still enamored of the weird spectacles enabled by "mo-cap" and fills this A Christmas Carol with more of those 3D snowflakes (the best part of The Polar Express), slapsticky action, and nasty-looking waxworks that purport to be people.

Disney's A Christmas Carol allows Jim Carrey to play four roles, one of them at five different ages: Scrooge as a young boy, teenage boy, young man, middle-aged man and old man, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. To paraphrase The Mask, somebody stop him! Carrey's idea of Scrooge is to affect a strange English dialect (one that often sounds more like a caricatured Indian accent); as far as his physical performance, captured and rendered in pixels, Carrey's exaggerated mime can be just as distracting when it's uncontained.

The real master class here is conducted by Gary Oldman, whose Bob Crachit and Tiny Tim (as well as his Jacob Marley) demonstrate true range and delicacy. The one saving grace of mo-cap is to enable such liberating exercises in pure acting (though radio, audiobooks and the stage afford similar opportunities). All the characters still look like airbrushed rubber dolls, whether played by Colin Firth, Bob Hoskins (whose Fezziwig does a preposterous full body flip), Robin Wright Penn, Cary Elwes, or Fionnula Flanagan. Walt Disney himself used to obessively pursue perfect photo-realism from his animation artists, until he realized it was a fool's errand to take expressionism out of the equation, so it's ironic to see motion-capture animation touted under the Disney banner. Call me a Scrooge, but I'll pass on this synthetic version of that most humanistic of tales.