Jim Carrey plays eight roles in this stupendously visual reworking of Charles Dickens’ iconic holiday tale; he delivers each character in unique ways, through accent, facial expression, and carriage.
Each character rendering is unique, capturing him in different life stages, respectful of Carrey’s superhuman transformative powers. Carrey plays the gamut of emotions, and every one works because he is a stone cold genius.
But our boy needs a hit about now following a long underwhelming run that includes The Number 23 and Yes Man. While A Christmas Carol will draw plenty of holiday traffic, and will enter the Christmas classic canon just because … it’s not the greatest offering from Disney. The artwork is nothing short of stupendous, with each painstakingly drafted detail creating myriad emotions and textures as Dickens wrote them, but it may be too much of a good thing.
Technical wizardry tends to overwhelm not only the story but our emotions, knocking the air out of the soufflé. There is no space to experience the story because something big and impressive is bearing down on us, followed by another and another.
There’s also that thing about CGI, the images are perfectly formed, and representative of the real thing, but the living spark is absent, and the things are deadened. Sometimes it can work, but in a story that is already dark and death obsessed, the difference between life and not life is a hairline. There is too little gaiety and colour, too much dust and fear, too much clanging of special effects.
A Christmas Carol is a tad short of a regular film length so the filmmakers opted to flesh it out, fair enough, as they have in every film version to date. But to put Scrooge in a sewer to stretch for time just indicates a lack of integrity and imagination – a low point.
Colin Firth plays Scrooge’ nephew Fred and Gary Oldman plays his longsuffering clerk Bob Cratchit. Oldman also plays the voices of Tiny Tim and ghostly, ghastly Jacob Marley. Bob Hoskins, Robin Wright Penn, and Cary Elwes have small roles.
Its interesting how some ‘cartoons’ look like exaggerated versions of some actors and others are identifiable by a single strong physical indicator. Where Carrey has those unmistakable eyes in eight roles, Penn has that signature cheekbone structure and Oldman the apple cheeks. They look like themselves but not perfectly so; they look like the characters they are playing.
Our view of Victorian London is staggering, the details and dimensions of the architecture are from a bygone era, erased by WWII bombings, and now animated for our viewing pleasure by the Disney team.
It’s a mixed bag of blessings, but ultimately worthwhile; we are reminded how broad is Jim Carrey’s scope and talent. Let’s hope this gives him the boost he deserves.
70mm 3D IMAX digital animated fantasy 
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