A Christmas Carol (2009)

Let me begin by saying that I love Charles Dickens’s classic novella “A Christmas Carol.” I’ve seen countless film adaptations of the story and it never gets old.1 I even dressed up as the unfortunate and terrible ghost of Jacob Marley for Halloween one year during high school after carefully reading the original to make sure I got the details right.

So when Robert “I shat upon the classic picture book The Polar Express by adding Tom Hanks and weird dead-eyed animated children into the mix” Zemeckis took this project on, I cringed, and not a little bit.2 But I went to see anyway it because I still love Dickens’s story, by gum. And as long as they didn’t deviate from the original plot too much, it couldn’t be all bad.

Much to my relief, it wasn’t too horrible at all. Yeah, you do have to contend with the “Ooh look at me using 3-D” moments. One too many scenes with Scrooge falling and flailing through the air for my taste. And yeah, you do have to deal with the persistently dead-eyed characters. I don’t care whether they did use retinal scanning technology to try to get rid of the dead eyes—it didn’t entirely work and the effect is alienating.

But happily the movie does deliver some of the most important pleasures of Dickens's original text. While surprisingly leaving the old style prose intact, Zemeckis nevertheless makes the effort to bring something new to the party by playing up the ghostly characters to an extreme. Plus Jim Carrey does an unexpectedly great job at interpreting many different roles, all mercifully distant from his previous less than fresh work.

Overall, not the best adaptation of Dickens’s story so far, but one which certainly promises many more yet to come. And I can't say humbug to that!

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1. Shout out to my all time favorite, The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)!!
2. Not an entirely fair assessment of Zemeckis, to be sure—he has produced, written, and directed a number of movies that I have enjoyed quite a bit. I just took The Polar Express personally because, as a child who was literally devastated by the revelation that Santa isn’t real, I clung desperately to the message of faith that was in the original text of The Polar Express. I still have the little jingle bell that came with the book.