Ghosts of Technology Present


ImageMovers Digital/Walt Disney Pictures
"Disney’s A Christmas Carol," starring Jim Carrey as Scrooge.

“Disney’s A Christmas Carol,” written and directed by Robert Zemeckis, a branded piece of shiny seasonal entertainment, uses the digital technique of performance capture and the enhancements of 3-D projection to deliver a big, noisy and sometimes terrifying version of the Charles Dickens tale on which it is based. That much is to be expected, and the casting of Jim Carrey as Ebenezer Scrooge (and some of the ghosts who haunt him) might also lead you to expect rubber-limbed clowning and a motor-mouth barrage of semi-crude humor.

But the surprise of this movie — a welcome one — is that, in the midst of obeying the rules of modern-day spectacle, it sticks close to some of the sturdy virtues of the source material. Mr. Zemeckis’s script retains much of the flavor of Dickens’s prose — not just the catchphrases like “Bah, humbug” and “God bless us everyone,” but also the formal diction and the moral concern. The specters that pop out at poor Scrooge on his nightlong ordeal are certainly frightening (parents of young children, consider yourselves warned), but the dread derives much of its force from the cruelty and selfishness that define Scrooge’s world.

“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” Scrooge demands when he’s asked for a donation to help the poor. And in the film, as in Dickens, his stinginess is an extreme but hardly anomalous instance of a prevailing social attitude. The London that Mr. Zemeckis renders has a storybook quality, for sure, but a pall of poverty and injustice hangs over its brick houses and cobbled streets. It’s not only the ingenuity of 3-D that sends some of that shadow drifting into the theaters. And the ghosts are not playful spooks but rather symbols of the deep terror at the heart of this not-entirely-cheerful story, governed from start to finish by the agonizing fear of death.

Mr. Carrey, his facial features exaggerated by the animating process and his voice a dry, creaky growl, takes his place in a long and diverse line of screen Scrooges, including Mr. Magoo, George C. Scott, Bill Murray and Alastair Sim, the British actor whose 1951 version remains definitive. But Mr. Carrey, using the advantages of the motion-capture technique and overcoming some of its obstacles, does an excellent job of showing how the character recovers his humanity.

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