A Christmas Carol
Jim Carrey motion-captured for the new version of A Christmas Carol
Thursday, 05, Nov 2009 11:57
Directed by Robert Zemeckis, out November 6th in cinemas, starring Jim Carrey, Colin Firth, Gary Oldman, Bob Hoskins, Robin Wright Penn, Cary Elwes, running time 96 mins.
What's it all about?
Robert Zemeckis puts the motion-capture techniques of The Polar Express and Beowulf to work in transforming a Dickens classic...
What the others say
"By the time A Christmas Carol finishes piling its many shiny presents with their many bells and whistles under the tree, there's no room left for tears for Tiny Tim. Bah humbug indeed." - Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times
"The story that Dickens wrote in 1838 remains timeless, and if it's supercharged here with Scrooge swooping the London streets as freely as Superman, well, once you let ghosts into a movie, there's room for anything." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times
So is it any good?
Oh joy, you probably thought when you saw the posters go up, just what we need: ANOTHER bloody interpretation of A Christmas Carol. If there was ever a tale to make you say "Bah, humbug" then Dickens' festive novel must be a contender. Has any story ever been remade, reinterpreted or reimagined as often as this one?
And then you sit down and watch it and discover, well, yes, some admittedly odd animation (and more on that in a second) but an overall excellent adaptation that delivers the original Dickensian spirit in spades. Rather than update or "reimagine" (and seriously, don't even get me started on what Tim Burton appears to have done to Alice in Wonderland), Zemeckis does what anybody with sense would do: start with Dickens' novel and don't bugger about with it too much.
Yes, there are some flights of fancy (I don't remember Scrooge shrinking to the size of a mouse and being pursued by the Horses of Hell through the streets of London, for example) but for the most part this is wonderfully faithful telling that's stuffed full of speeches that appear, if memory serves, to have been taken straight from the source. There's no mollycoddling of modern children, no attempt to soften Scrooge or turn him into a comedy turn and no shirking from the story's moral. It might feature very modern techniques (and some excellent 3D work) but this is Dickens' story all the way.
Carrey is superbly cantankerous as the voice of Scrooge and completely unrecognisable as the voices of the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet To Come. You might not approve entirely of the accents (Past appears to be a simpering Irish candle, Present is... well, Billy Connolly-meets-Santa-via Dublin and, apparently, Melbourne) but it's easy to overlook the geographical wandering when the film is so beautiful to watch.
As mentioned above, Zemeckis' insistence on using his actors' own images in the animation (a la Tom Hanks in Polar Express and pretty much everyone in Beowulf) doesn't always work. Firth, as Scrooge's cheery nephew Fred, is oddly squashed and crumpled but still fares better than Oldman's Bob Cratchit who appears to be about 4' 7" and part-troll. But again, the positives outweigh the oddities by a considerable margin and Scrooge's transformation from money-grabbing curmudgeon to thoroughly decent, generous chap is still a moving and heartwarming delight. All in all, a very pleasant surprise.
8/10
Neil Davey