BEFORE: Happy Festivus to all! I've declared that today I celebrate Festivus, which usually involves me going on a walking tour of NYC's holiday markets and picking up those last-minute Christmas gifts. But because of the shortened season, I wasn't able to take a day off from work, so this year Festivus happens to fall on a Saturday. It would have been last Saturday, but it snowed, so today it is - that's the great thing about Festivus, it takes place when I say it does. My wife joined me for the first time, but still I truncated the tour down to just a pizza place, the Union Square holiday market, the big 5-floor Barnes & Noble, and the Heartland Brewery. Oh, and the liquor store on the way home. Christmas shopping is DONE.
Linking from "A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas", Patton Oswalt was also in "Man on the Moon" with Jim Carrey (last seen in "The Dead Pool"). And thanks to that claymation sequence, my Christmas films this year are all at least partially animated.
THE PLOT: An animated retelling of Charles Dickens' classic novel about a Victorian-era miser taken on a journey of self-redemption, courtesy of several mysterious Christmas apparitions.
AFTER: Two things have to happen for me to really feel like it's Christmas - and neither of them is watching Paul Schaffer's impression of Cher singing "Oh, Holy Night" or Darlene Love singing "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)", though those are both great traditions. I need to go on the Festivus walking tour, and I need to watch some version of "A Christmas Carol". It can be the Patrick Stewart version, or Bill Murray's "Scrooged", and perhaps next year it will be the Muppets' turn, but this year the spotlight falls on the 2009 mo-cap version, directed by Robert Zemeckis.
NOTE: I'm not calling it "Disney's A Christmas Carol", because I don't acknowledge that as a valid title format. It's CHARLES DICKENS' "A Christmas Carol", goddammit, just as it's really Victor Hugo's "Hunchback of Notre Dame" and Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Tarzan". Once you allow Disney to start adding possessives, where do you stop? Will it someday be "Disney's The Muppets' A Christmas Carol"? Or "Disney's Marvel's The Avengers' Christmas Special"? I'm drawing a line right here, right now. Too many apostrophes.
Anyway, I'm drawn to some version of this story each year (which is my favorite? more on that later) because it's a GOOD story, and good stories are timeless. There are no doubt hundreds of variations on this story, dozens of which air on the Lifetime Network, but the fact that it crosses all ethnic and age barriers just emphasizes how adaptable it is. Sure, you can take it as an examination of Victorian money-lending procedures, but you'd be missing the point. It's really about self-reflection and redemption. Plus, though "The Time Machine" usually gets credit as the first time-travel story, Dickens really beat it to the punch by about 50 years - so suck on that, H.G. Wells.
The story works for the one-percenters who may identify with Scrooge, or more likely appeals to the other 99% of adults who identify with Bob Crachit - who among us hasn't at least looked into the cost of hiring 3 actors in ghost costumes to visit their boss late at night? OK, maybe that's just me. But I'm telling you, it can work if you don't mind a little breaking and entering...
This version is told via CGI and motion-capture, which has its advantages and disadvantages. This allowed the filmmakers to make just about anything mentioned in Dickens' book appear on the screen. If the floor of the room is meant to disappear and create the illusion that the room is soaring over Victorian London, well give some nerds enough computing power, and they can get that on the screen. Jacob Marley's jaw can become unhinged and flap around wildly, without an actor having to work with some weird prosthetic.
The downside, however, is that when all things are possible, there is a temptation to go too far. To have Scrooge's character shrunk down to mouse-size so he can hide in a drainpipe is an odd idea, plus it's not in the book. And he doesn't need to hide from the other characters, since they can't see him anyway. These are just shadows of things to come, remember?
But the process does allow for actors to play multiple characters - which almost hearkens back to the stage productions of "Peter Pan", where the same actor usually played Mr. Darling and Captain Hook (how Freudian for young Wendy!). Carrey's features can be seen not only in Scrooge, but in two of the three ghostly visitors, which would be quite difficult to achieve in live-action (too many split-screens) - and this also reinforces the dream-like nature of Scrooge's visions, since I've heard that in your dreams, all the other characters are really just other aspects of yourself. (Wouldn't it have been great if the Ghost of Christmas Past ended up looking like Fire Marshall Bill from "In Living Color"?)
That's right, I'm going on record as saying that Scrooge's experience is a dream - you can really interpret it either way, ghost story or dream. (I used to wonder about that line in the song "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year", where it mentions "scary ghost stories" - what kind of a nutty family tells ghost stories at Christmas? Then I remembered, "Oh yeah, Dickens.") But if you think about it, the only helpful ghost is really the second one. Scrooge knows all too well what happened to him in the past (but he needs to be reminded), and he has to know that he's going to die some time in the future, right? The only real insight to be gained is getting that fly-on-the-wall look at how his nephew and the Cratchits celebrate the holiday. Rich or poor, when the day comes, you've got to pull out all the stops.
Scrooge's dream (or spiritual experience, or whatever) follows the simple Rule of Three, and as such contains a message that represents Dickens' formula for redemption/happiness: face your past, enjoy the present, and try not to be such a dick to people in the future. And that's what's universal, almost completely non-denominational, and works whether it's Christmastime or not.
My only other complaint about this version is that we don't get to see enough of Scrooge interacting with the townspeople, most of whom have borrowed money from him. Admittedly it's been a long time since I read the book, so I don't know if this was just a stylistic choice, but I think the story is stronger the more he's depicted as a usurer in the beginning, and the more he's seen forgiving debts at the end. This is something well represented in my favorite version of the story, which is:
The 1970 Albert Finney vehicle "Scrooge". I will defend this version over any other, for a number of reasons. First, it's got great musical numbers, especially "Father Christmas" and "Thank You Very Much", the latter of which is first sung ironically at Scrooge's funeral, and then sincerely at the end once all debts have been cleared. This film was made just 2 years after the Best Picture winner "Oliver!", based on another Dickens classic, and shares some of the same DNA. I just learned they were both filmed at Shepparton Studios, which explains a lot - they probably used some of the same Victorian sets and costumes.
In a casting twist, whereas Ebenezer Scrooge was usually played by an older actor, requiring the casting of a believable younger look-a-like for the flashbacks, Albert Finney was a relatively young man who played the past Scrooge with no make-up, and then they olded him up to play him in the present-day sequences, and he was very believable. (though he's now an older man, and his character in "Skyfall" looked completely different...) Finney was younger than the actor playing his nephew, a fact which oddly enough is repeated here in the Jim Carrey version.
Plus you've got Alec Guinness as Marley, and he does a hell of a job too - jeez, the man incurred a double hernia from wearing the apparatus needed to carry his chains. That's commitment.
NITPICK POINT: (And this refers to all versions of the story, even the original) Marley tells Scrooge he will be visited by three ghosts - but Marley himself is a ghost - so shouldn't it be FOUR ghosts? Or shouldn't Marley at least say "You will be visited by three MORE ghosts, not including myself?"
Marley also says that the ghosts will arrive on successive nights, but then when Scrooge wakes up, he realizes that they got it all done in one night. That's why he's so surprised - but since the story was originally written in serialized chapters, my guess is that halfway through, Dickens realized that Scrooge's redemption would be more powerful if it occured in time to celebrate Christmas, and not Boxing Day.
Also starring the voices of Gary Oldman (last seen in "The Dark Knight Rises"), Colin Firth (last seen in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"), Bob Hoskins (last seen in "The Wind in the Willows"), Robin Wright Penn (last seen in "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"), Cary Elwes (last seen in "Days of Thunder")
RATING: 5 out of 10 street urchins
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