A Christmas Carol

Directed by Robert Zemeckis

Runtime: 96 min.

Add Robert Zemeckis to the list of filmmakers exposed by Michael Jackson's This is It. The empathetic star-power in that beautiful concert film should have inspired a brilliant remake of A Christmas Carol. Instead, Zemeckis made his pact with technology. Every shot is a gimmick in Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol. Strange that Charles Dickens' great, imperishable tale about change-of-heart should be adapted by a filmmaker who has renounced brilliant satire (I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Used Cars, Back to the Future) in order to sentimentalize and distort human beings (starting with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? then famously with Forest Gump).

Zemeckis' latest motion-capture CGI project capsizes Dickens' narrative power simply because the faces of the human simulacra are so utterly inexpressive and ugly. Based on the physiognomy of actual actors, the planes and contours are stretched and flattened into doll-like inauthenticity. The added 3-D effect can't provide the inner light that makes a human close-up transcendent.

Like cinema's other famous technocrats Kubrick and Fincher, Zemeckis uses trickery to distance himself from the responsibilities of feeling; his fear of emotion becomes obvious with this film's truncated Tiny Tim ending. Negating uplift like a hipster, Zemeckis unbalances Dickens' lessons in compassion, remorse and the psychological insight that makes repentance a useful social force.

Zemeckis cheapens Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey) into a literal cartoon (more like Crispin Glover; Jackson might have been transendent). Scrooge's cry: "Nothing's more terrifying to me than a life doomed to poverty," has a hollow, ADR ring; it lacks fleshly conviction. No wonder Zemeckis does best with Dickens' ghosts: Marley is a tragic drone chained to toil and materialism. ("Mankind was my business!") Christmas Present is fearsomely robust (though less convincing than Kenneth More in Scrooge). Christmas Past, visualized as a candle flame, is magnificently eerie; an Odilon Redon specter representing the subconscious as memory.

These excellent creations should complement the human drama, not overwhelm it. Scrooge's trial, "a heavenly perspective of man's world," demonstrates pure cinemaa soaring, all-seeing angle on the mundane. But when shadowy Christmas Present instructs Scrooge on industrialism's social failures ("This Boy: Ignorance, This Girl: Want. Beware!") the lack of social resonance cheapens the film's purpose. These are expensive cheap thrills. Already, we retreat from Spike Jonze's lo-fi transformation of book illustration in Where the Wild Things Are. Zemeckis turns A Christmas Carol into a Halloween movie.