Week of November 5, 2009, Issue #733
FILM
SideVue: What the Dickens?
Brian Gibson / brian@vueweekly.com
Just as the Halloween cards are leaving the store (really? Halloween cards now? who actually wants a card instead of, or even with, candy? Unless it’s edible), we get the first Christmas movie.
And as clichéd as a candy cane, as certain as a Boxing Day sale, it’s yet another version of Charles Dickens’ classic (which inspired a Disney character, Dr. Seuss’ Yuletide story, and It’s A Wonderful Life). This time, it’s Jim Carrey in another of Robert Zemeckis’ “Image Motion Performance Capture” movies (http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/story.html?id=2165160), where people look caught halfway in a tale of two states—computer-animated and human. The 3-D release should only accentuate this person-encased-in-CGI effect.
So, once again, now 166 years after the book, a movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol (the 28th adaptation) reflects its time—in this case, the manufactured rage for machine-driven effects. (1988’s Scrooged gave us a nasty TV exec in the greedy, cold-hearted ’80s; 2008’s An American Carol is a pro-conservative, anti-Michael Moore satire epitomizing the post-Bush, right-wing pundit atmosphere.)
But why has Dickens’ story proved so popular with filmmakers? There’s nothing particularly cinematic about Dickens’ work—his serialized novels, first appearing in weekly or monthly issues, better suit TV with its weekly, episodic format. A Christmas Carol, though, is a novella, close to the length of a screenplay—90 pages for 90 minutes.
And of course it has that seasonal appeal movie releases still count on, with its guaranteed PG target demographic, but also involves the supernatural and even a science-fiction element. Zemeckis has said, on a DVD featurette for his Back To The Future trilogy, that Dickens’ work is one of his favourite time-travel stories. And from the trailer, there’s lots of zipping about in Zemeckis’ version—Scrooge’s flying, falling and running makes Victorian London look like a theme-park ride.
All of ’er is a twist on the original tale. Dickens did make sure to emphasize the supernatural in his tale—the book was subtitled Being A Ghost Story of Christmas when it appeared in 1843 (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/adopt-a-book/pics/christ_carol.jpg). But its focus was on the poor and on Dickens’ Victorian sense of Christian charity. A wealthy man had an obligation to help those who are poor: Scrooge’s rich partner Marley, full of remorse in the afterlife, talks of “‘a Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere’” and, as for “‘business’”: “‘The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business’” that he neglected in life. In an utilitarian era when the economic gulf was smaller than today but still about 1000X wide—the working-class averaged around £25 a year while aristocrats had land and investments worth £30 000 on average—the call goes out to the Scrooge McDucks, while larger society and the government are not seen as sources of help (smash-cut to today, when the government bails out Wall Street companies). The carol is for the poor. Dickens had some great expectations for his story, intending it to bring home to his readers with a “Sledge hammer” force, the brutal poverty so many Victorians were suffering from, especially children. Most film adaptations skimp on showing Cratchit and Co.’s bleak homes.
The book, while both glaring at the individual Scrooge and seeming to be “reaching out” kindly to the individual reader, as University of Alberta professor Ruth Glancy has noted (Google Books link), does offer touching scenes of group conviviality and good cheer—Fezziwig’s ball, Cratchit’s home—which epitomize Christmas for us, because the holiday as we celebrate it today is largely an invention of Dickens and his fellow Victorians (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/xmas/pva63.html).
But the tale’s warm sentiment is meant to light compassion—to move, to act, to go out and give. That’s what A Christmas Carol did when it was published—one man in Boston was so moved by an 1867 reading that he closed his factory for Christmas Day and sent every employee a turkey. (Dickens had already provoked the razing of a slum with Oliver Twist and the reform of schools with Nicholas Nickleby.) Stories entertain, but they also move—those that the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future tell Scrooge are meant as lessons for the rich.
In these hard times, more capitalist and neo-conservative and class-(en)gulfing than ever, there’s a sharp lesson for the wealthy in the ghosts’ confrontation of Scrooge for having judged and dismissed the poor, instead of helping them.
And that’s where adaptations of A Christmas Carol have truly lost their frosty bite. The heart of the tale’s only found when Scrooge discovers his, after he’s realized he must act—who can forget the joy that swells up inside Sim’s Scrooge, chortling away when he’s finally done some small bit of good for someone else? (2:25-2:45 of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7NfDuDh0Uc&feature=related)
Zemeckis’ version may capture motion, but it’s unlikely to inspire it—tradition-turned-routine has taken the charge out of Dickens’ gift. A story that was performed and played (Dickens began his famous public readings of the novella in 1853 and had done 127 of them by his death in 1870), that confronted and moved others to go out and help—making others’ welfare our true “busy”ness—has become about Christmas itself, wrapped up and packaged for an early-November opening weekend, a passive tradition to be watched and re-watched, thought of as nostalgic or sweet. Like the holiday itself, like that turkey or goose on the table, it’s become stuffed and posed, its flavour and festiveness drained away. Maybe deep down, in the cockles of our hearts, Sim’s A Christmas Carol sparks up a nostalgia for a simpler time of action and activism, a “reaching out” for something on Christmas—something that comes when you give more than you receive, sacrifice more than you consume, and don’t just let the lights come up around the theatre, walk into the lightly falling snow, then drive off into the distance.
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