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A Christmas Carol
I’ll admit it: I was pretty leery of A Christmas Carol going in. An oft-told story to begin with, I remained skeptical of what motion-capture animation could do to enhance its well-trodden charms, and dreaded the potential wave of mugging that would accompany Jim Carrey’s voiceover work. But A Christmas Carol ends up being a fairly satisfying, and occasionally thrilling, experience, in large part due to writer-director Robert Zemeckis’ marrying of visually-rich animation with a satisfyingly sincere approach to storytelling.
Zemeckis keeps to a minimum the cutesy pop-culture references and desperate bids of audience affection that bog down so many mainstream animated films. The classic tale of miserly Ebenezer Scrooge (Carrey) and his change of world view after being visited by three spirits one fateful Christmas Eve takes no radically new turns here, remaining as sturdy and affecting a holiday story as ever. Indeed, Zemeckis seems aware of the story’s cozy-as-a-blanket familiarity, and shakes things up a bit by exploring its oft-forgotten dark corners. So, not only do we see the classic image of Jacob Marley (voiced here by Gary Oldman) dragging his ghostly chains through Scrooge’s darkened bedchamber, but also see a whole army of tortured spirits, moaning in agony as they float through the London night sky and relive the sins of their former lives. It’s a nice reminder that, at root, A Christmas Carol finds its power in the disturbing notion that one’s life has been wasted, and that it may be too late to reverse course.
Though not all gloom and doom (there is a Disney holiday picture, after all), A Christmas Carol expresses this seriousness of tone through a pleasingly dusky and somber visual palette. Zemeckis and his team of animators have become particularly adept at visualizing the subtleties of firelight. A couple of well-placed candles or a single fireplace will often be the sole source of illumination within a scene, and the play of light and shadow across the characters’ faces proves entrancing on a purely aesthetic level. The leaps that motion-capture animation have taken since Zemeckis’ The Polar Express cannot be understated; truly, the medium is the star here. Carrey seems to realize this, and dials back his usual vocal effusions to emphasize Scrooge’s small-minded bitterness and melancholy. (He also voices the three ghosts and Scrooge at various ages.)
Where A Christmas Carol runs into trouble is when Zemeckis lets his technological prowess supersede his sense of storytelling. The film opens with a majestic single-take journey through the wintry London streets, the camera flying over church steeps and swooping past by-standers. Zemeckis seemingly knows he has found a nifty trick here, because it is repeated to increasingly diminishing returns throughout the movie. This thrill-ride aesthetic has its incidental pleasures, but it frequently conflicts with the film’s more-sober emotional core; you hear the technological gears turning a little too loudly. Still, the film’s modest pleasures are a hopeful sign for the future of this burgeoning medium: an artistic potential more akin to the deep and sustained magic of flight, rather than the kicky, fleeting thrill of a roller coaster.
Matt Connolly
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