Movies: A Christmas Carol * * *
BAH HUMBUG: Robert Zemeckis' performance capture technique is worst of both worlds, but A Christmas Carol is still an entertaining movie.
Friday November 06 2009
In A Christmas Carol, Robert Zemeckis continues his rather strange obsession with the so-called 'performance capture' technique, which began in 2004 with the kids' film Polar Express and continued in 2007 with his truly bizarre version of Beowulf. Performance capture records the movements and expressions of actors and translates them into a digital model. And although the resulting 3D images are referred to as live action, they look just like animation, only uglier. In Dickens' timeless fable, Zemeckis has at least found a subject guaranteed to show off the process's advantages. For performance capture allows the director total control, and lets him fly wherever he might.
Believe it or not, there have been more than 20 film adaptations to date of Charles Dickens' much loved 1843 novella, ranging from the sublime (the classic 1951 British film starring Alastair Sim) to the pleasantly ridiculous (Bill Murray's 1988 comic update, Scrooged). And in A Christmas Carol Zemeckis, on the face of it, is commendably faithful to the original story.
Jim Carrey, or rather a Jim Carrey who has been filtered through a digital sieve, plays Ebenezer Scrooge, who at the start of the film (it's Christmas Eve) is presented as one of the most unpleasant men in all of London. A gradgrind of the first order, Scrooge has made a tiny fortune in business yet persists in hoarding every penny.
He begrudges his freezing assistant Bob Cratchit more than a measly half bucket of coal a day, and even resents giving him Christmas Day off. And when a pair of jolly gentlemen call looking for alms for the unfortunate, Scrooge enquires as to whether the workhouses and jails are still in working order, then says the weak should die in order "to decrease the surplus population".
Having been thoroughly disagreeable to everyone, old Scrooge wends his way home to his lonely house muttering away to himself through a snowstorm. When he's opening his front door he sees the knocker transform into the twisted face of his dead partner, Jacob Marley, but dismisses it as a bad case of indigestion. But little does he know that it's the beginning of a night of spookiness in which his sorry life will be spread out before him by a series of instructive ghosts.
In Zemeckis' Christmas Carol the unfortunate Ebenezer Scrooge is pulled hither and thither across the skyscape of early Victorian London by vengeful spooks determined to show him the error of his parsimonious ways -- and with your 3D specs on, these scenes are most effective. The city streets and rooftops are painstakingly mapped out, and there's a refreshing absence of accents inspired by the Dick Van Dyke school of cockney.
With a story as good as this one it's rather hard to go wrong, and while it might be a little dark at times for very small kids, overall the film is as entertaining as you'd expect. And Carrey does well so far as I can tell -- it's just that it would have been much easier to get involved in his plight if I'd actually been able to see him.
Part of the problem with the performance capture technique is that in ways it's the worst of both worlds -- neither a bold animation nor a live action drama, it lacks the charm of the former and the veracity of the latter. And the flattening out of expressions and faces deadens not only Carrey's performance but also potentially interesting supporting ones from the likes of Colin Firth and Gary Oldman.
The mysterious process is also exorbitantly expensive -- Zemeckis' film cost a staggering $175m to make. And while A Christmas Carol is not without its merits, it's hard to believe that the talents of Carrey, a timeless story and a budget of this size could not have been put to far better use in a live action drama.
- Paul Whitington
Irish Independent
