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A Christmas Carol

Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman

It seems about time for blowhard Bill O'Reilly and his foot soldiers at the American Family Association to dust off their tired rhetoric and terrorize corporations that make the mistake of trying to be inclusive during the holidays. If you haven't heard there is a work on Christmas going on. If a store or corporation is not readily at hand, there is always a school that makes the mistake of printing "winter break" instead of "Christmas break." Jews, Muslims, or even atheists, who cares if they feel included, it is not like Christians follow the teachings of someone who was put to death because he was an outsider or anything. Granted they more often than not get their facts wrong like they did with Home Depot or Costco last year. Facts, smacks, Fox News could not be fair and balanced if they let a little thing like facts trip them up. Never mind that if you are a Christian, who truly believes you are celebrating a sacred event you might want some separation from the more secular elements of the society.

Whether you like it or not, our contemporary Christmas celebration is less about Jesus and more about family than we would like to admit. The dirty little secret that no one is going to tell you, much like getting married for romantic love, our modern Christmas celebration is fairly new, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century and if we have any one person to thank for it, it would be Charles Dickens. Before him, the holiday was less about the family and more church centered. For its time, A Christmas Carol was a liberal cannonball! If Fox News had been around in 1843, they would be denouncing it as if it was the bastard love child of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The story is filled by Dickens' trademark concern for the poor and social injustice (Hard Times, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist). Not only was Scrooge a representative of the wealthy and Bob Cratchit the hard working lower classes, but the entire short story is filled with critiques of the British welfare system and laws directed at the poor, that there was an obligation to treat them humanely and with compassion. Poverty was not a sign of moral depravity or a flaw in one's character but rather a set of social conditions. That is almost enough to make Sean Hannity vomit pea soup and spin his head around three times.

Yet, to truly understand how revolutionary A Christmas Carol is one must understand the history of Christmas. For most of the history of Christianity the celebration of the nativity was a minor event, nowhere on the level of Easter. There is no reference to it at all in the early church. Many of the early church theologians ridiculed the notion of celebrating the birth of Jesus, celebrating the birth of gods is something the heathen and sinners do. In fact, the actual date of Jesus' birth is probably in August. Rather winter festivals, the rebirth of the sun, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, were popular festivals in the areas that Christian missionaries visited. These missionaries converted pagan rituals and festivals into Christian celebrations. The earliest mention of Jesus' birth being December 25 is in 354 ADand was overshadowed by the Epiphany for the next few centuries. Christmas gained importance when Kings and rulers like Charlemagne and William I started linking themselves to Christ by being crowned on his birthday. It was a festival used by Kings and rulers to enhance their importance, especially the Pope. It was in the aftermath of the Reformation that the Roman Catholic Church sought to make the festival more religious and church centered. Puritans tried to down play it as just more "trappings of papery." In this country, Christmas fell out of favor because many considered it an English custom, which is why it was not unseemly for George Washington to attack the Hessians at Trenton, New Jersey on Christmas eve.

There was a fear in the mid-nineteenth century that Christmas was falling out of favor. People were not as involved in the religious and communal events as they once had been. Dickens and others sought to reinvent the festival, making it more about family and compassion than the religious and hedonistic elements that previously marked it. Poet Thomas Hood stated, "If Christmas, with its ancient and hospitable customs, its social and charitable observances, were in danger of decay, this is the book that would give them a new lease. "Yet, the real concern for today's audience is not whether Christmas needs a new lease but rather do we really need a new filmed version of A Christmas Carol. It or satires of it have probably been done at least a hundred times. The Fonz, George C. Scott, Patrick Stewart, the Jetsons, Blackadder, Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Muppets, the Looney Tunes twice, Kelsey Grammer, Sesame Street, 101 Dalmatians, Northern Exposure, Highway to Heaven, Vanessa "the undressa" Williams, Married With Children, Family Ties, Rich Little, Sanford and Son, Mister Magoo, Vincent Price, and Mickey Mouse have all had their crack at it. Four times it has been made into a musical. The British actors Basil Rathbone (Sherlock Holmes), Seymour Hicks and Alastair Sim have all played Scrooge in two different big screen retellings. The 1951 version starring Sim is probably the most popular. The funniest by far is the Bill Murray take-off, Scrooged in 1988. There has even been a porn version of it (probably more than one). It seems to be the favorite "go to" idea for any screenwriter fresh out of ideas. So, why another one?

Writer and director Robert Zemeckis (Back To The Future, Romancing The Stone, Forrest Gump) who, in recent years, has fallen in love with 3-D performance capture computer animation, as seen in Zemeckis' other two recent films, Beowulf and The Polar Express. While amazing to look at and probably the wave of the future, it is still a little off-setting, the faces and the eyes are not quite right. It is not quite a cartoon and not quite live action, which creates a distance between the audience and the story which trips the viewer up a little. Given Zemeckis' reputation, he has assembled the most star-studded cast to ever act out this tale. While not the comedy superstar he was a decade back, Jim Carrey (Ace Ventura, The Mask, Dumb & Dumber) plays not only Ebenezer Scrooge but the ghosts of Christmas past, present and yet to come. Gary Oldman (Batman Begins, Harry Potter, JFK, Leon) also puts on his workman boots and portrays not only Bob Cratchit, but also Jacob Marley and Tiny Tim. The cast is rounded out by Colin Firth, Bob Hoskins, Robin Wright Penn, and Cary Elwes all of whom take on multiple roles. Still, one has to ask, is motion capture animation enough of a reason to produce the most expensive version of this story ever, especially when a movie like Bill Murray's Scoorged had fun with the material and this is extremely faithful to the source material?

Unless you have lived in a cave all of your life, I do not believe I need to rehash the plot of this movie. Spend five minutes flipping through the television channels between Thanksgiving and Christmas and you are bound to stumble across one version or another. In fact, I have gotten so cynical and jaded that I almost hope the movie ends with Scrooge firing Cratchit. burning their house to the ground and kicking the crutch out from underneath Tiny Tim's arm. So is this version of A Christmas Carol worth your hard earned money and time? Only if you catch it on IMAX. It is a good version, but I am pretty sure there is another version just around the corner for next year.

Verdict: An Okay Retelling