Movie and Television Reviews

Magnificent.

A Christmas Carol combines a traditional, faithful in every sense of the word telling of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with probably the best realistic-type animation ever, surpassing the previous record-holders, Up and Bolt from the past year.

It’s been usual for contemporary adaptations to update the CC premise, sometimes infusing it with a modern, secular sensibility. Not this time. We get a historically accurate setting with characters approaching Christmas as one would imagine a Victorian Brit would: No toys, just family meals and good will. No doubt this is because Zemeckis uses the exact sequence of events as the original story and keeps Dickens’ language in all of its Victorian glory. The latter means that Scrooge and the love he discards for money break their "contract," not their "engagement," Scrooge doesn’t ask to be "taken away," but "removed," and purchases Turkeys from the "Poulterers."

(It wouldn’t be an altogether bad idea next year to purchase the DVD and watch CC it in one’s home with Dickens’ text in hand.)

Zemeckis' direction is extraordinary with some wonderful angles and a quite effective chase scene. The pacing, near-perfect; only once did I feel the arc sagging a bit.

Good music and just the perfect amount of sensible scariness for kids about 8 years old.

Message/Politics:

CC is probably the most anti-Ayn Rand movie of the year: Men cannot be happy being selfish. In fact, our joy correlates quite strongly with how much we help our fellow men. In CC, Charity is a duty to one’s neighbors and oneself and it's primarily because…

…God meant it when He commanded to care for others as we would ourselves. CC is that rare supernatural movie that’s also theologically sound. Choices in the earthly life affect the next, or, each act of selfishness is a link in the chain one drags in Hell, to borrow Dickens’ metaphor. And no amount of post-condemnation charitable inclination can remedy one’s fate, as one ghost in CC finds out after futily offering to relieve and mother and her child’s suffering.

There are earthly consequences for the selfish rich as well. Poverty and Ignorance, personified in CC by a little boy and girl who grow up to be a criminal and prostitute respectively, attack Scrooge; suggesting a kind of Marxist rising of the proletariat.

Yet, CC isn’t a leftist movie, either. At one point Scrooge asks a man seeking donations for the poor if the workhouses, union shops, and prisons have shut down. Or, “I don’t need to give because the government already takes care of the poor. “

This is the theme of a book called Who Really Cares by Arthur Brooks which shows that religious conservatives, what Scrooge becomes at the end of the story, give much more money to charity than liberals, with one of the speculations as to why posited by Brooks being that socialists think charity is the government's job. You can see the verification of this theory on this chart:

Rank Countries Amount
# 1 Australia: 18%
# 2 United States: 15%
# 3 Netherlands: 9%
= 4 Ireland: 7%
= 4 Norway: 7%
= 6 Canada: 6%
= 6 Belgium: 6%
= 8 Germany: 5%
= 8 Finland: 5%
= 8 United Kingdom: 5%
= 8 Sweden: 5%
= 8 France: 5%
= 13 Austria: 3%
= 13 Italy: 3%
= 13 Switzerland: 3%
= 16 Denmark: 2%
= 16 Japan: 2%
Weighted average: 6.2%

So, CC is a conservative movie in that it forwards the idea that free enterprise married to a virtuous, NGO-obliged (like religion) mass ethic makes for the best society (as opposed to a Randian or Marxist one).

There is an anti-clerical line for people who aren't completely comfortable with organized religion.