'A Christmas Carol': Carrey, Disney Play Scrooge
'Precious' is a grim tale turned to gold; 'Goats' is mehhh and worse
To put it bluntly, if Scroogely, Disney's 3-D animated version of "A Christmas Carol" is a calamity. The pace is predominantly glacial—that alone would be enough to cook the goose of this premature holiday turkey—and the tone is joyless, despite an extended passage of bizarre laughter, several dazzling flights of digital fancy, a succession of striking images and Jim Carrey's voicing of Scrooge plus half a dozen other roles. "Why so coldhearted?" Scrooge's nephew, Fred, asks the old skinflint. The same question could be asked of Robert Zemeckis, who adapted and directed the film, and of the company that financed it. Why was simple pleasure frozen out of the production? Why does the beloved story feel embalmed by technology? And why are its characters as insubstantial as the snowflakes that seem to be falling on the audience?
A catch-all answer—and by now an all-too-familiar one—lies in the unnature of that technology. Like "The Polar Express" and "Beowulf," which were also directed by Mr. Zemeckis, "A Christmas Carol" employs a motion-capture process that translates the movements of live actors into fantasy images. For its advocates, the process is cost-efficient and good enough. For its detractors, including me, motion capture has become synonymous with a special sort of semi-lifelessness—body language that is vaguely impoverished, faces with limited mobility and dead eyes.
In the global marketing push for his new film, the director has dismissed such problems as essentially solved. But they haven't been solved at all; they've only been mitigated, and partially masked by the novelty value of 3-D. Motion capture remains an impediment to capturing emotion. "A Christmas Carol" soars only when Scrooge is in temporal transit—one lyrical sequence flies him back to his boyhood village. And some of the action, as well as a cataclysmic climax fueled by hellfires and hellwinds, will scare little kids out of their little wits.
Dickens framed his novella as a moral tale. Disney sells it as a thrill ride—"The Polar Express" with a really bad Santa. Well, it's a free country, and a public-domain property. Nevertheless, you can almost see the various rooms on the Disneyland ride-to-be while the movie makes its way from Victorian past to fun-house future. (Maybe the ride's sound design-to-be is why the Ghost of Christmas Present laughs so long and maniacally.) In the turgid stretches between action sequences, the drama, or what's left of it, makes its way with such ponderous, self-important artistry that Scrooge's present threatens to become an eternity. This sad excuse for family entertainment tries to enshrine a classic while defacing it.
'Precious'
One of the most telling moments of a shockingly beautiful film called "Precious" comes toward the end, and it's hardly more than a throwaway—the heroine glances at a mirror and sees herself. Until then mirrors have reflected her desperate fantasies of who she might be—a svelte blonde, a bejeweled black dancer or cover girl. That's because Claireece "Precious" Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) has found the sight of her physical self—like the plight of her spiritual self—unendurable. A 16-year-old African-American in the Harlem of 1987, she is mountainously obese, sexually and psychically abused, illiterate, almost mute and pregnant with her second child. The drama begins by giving her spirit voice—it's another notion of "A Beautiful Mind"—and follows her growth from a rageful child with a turbulent inner life to a formidable young woman with a life full of promise and hope.
The full, contractual title of the film, which was directed by Lee Daniels, is "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' By Sapphire." (Geoffrey Fletcher did the screen adaptation.) In addition to striking a blow for books and the written word, the title serves as a reminder that "Precious" is a work of fiction, by the African-American poet who calls herself Sapphire, and something of a fantasy in its own right—an inspirational fable about the power of kindness and caring. (The producers include Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry.)
That's not to diminish the fable's value, only to note the near-saintly devotion of an alternative-school teacher, Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), and a social worker, Ms. Weiss (Mariah Carey), and to acknowledge the time-lapse pace of the heroine's blossoming under their care. "Precious" is genuinely and irresistibly inspirational. If the filmmaking weren't so skillful and the acting weren't so consistently brilliant, you might mistake this production for a raw slice of life from a Third World country where movies can still be instruments of moral instruction and social change.
If Ms. Sidibe weren't playing the title role, it's hard to imagine what "Precious" would be. She doesn't play it, she invades and conquers it with concentrated energy and blithe humor. (Referring to the sophisticated Ms. Rain and her lesbian partner, Precious says, "They talk like a TV channel I don't watch.") And she's not the only spectacular attraction. The comedienne and actress Mo'Nique is stunningly effective as the heroine's monstrous mother, Mary, who makes a mockery of maternal instincts and comes undone in a ghastly confrontation that goes a long way toward explaining her monstrosity. This is a fine movie, and a deep one. It's about unearthing buried treasure.
'The Men Who Stare at Goats'
"The Men Who Stare At Goats" stars George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey. All of them look like they're having lots of fun, and their enjoyment promises to be infectious. After a while, though, the only sign of infection may be an urge to squirm. You may wonder if this screen version of the book of the same name is as unfunny and strangely mushy as it seems, but trust your instincts. There's no solid ground beneath the story of a secret U.S. Army unit that was dedicated to developing psychic powers. It's a goof about a bunch of goofballs.
Jon Ronson, the book's author, said the story was true; ostensibly sane citizens really did try to create a force of American soldiers with superpowers, warrior monks who could make themselves invisible, walk through walls or, as a training exercise if nothing else, kill a goat by staring at it. Yet demonstrable truth wasn't the issue. The pleasures of the book came from the craziness of the schemes, the fervor of the crackpots who devised them and the steady skepticism of the prose. In the movie, which was directed by Grant Heslov from a screenplay by Peter Straughan, the two main crackpots, played by Mr. Clooney and Mr. Bridges, have become arch charmers, and the tone is New Age whimsy, with absurdist overtones by way of the Coen brothers and Wes Anderson. One of the superpowers under study involves remote viewing via extrasensory perception. I wish I could have viewed this movie remotely, or not at all.
'The Fourth Kind'
Here are two true things about Olatunde Osunsanmi's "The Fourth Kind." In the opening scene, the actress Milla Jovovich introduces herself as the actress Milla Jovovich, which she is—actually she says "I am actress Milla Jovovich"—and announces that she will play a psychologist named Abbey Tyler, which she does. What may be less than true is the actress's announcement that Abbey is a real-life victim of alien abduction, and that scenes showing the real Abbey, along with corroborating evidence from her terrified patients, have been taken from really real documentary footage.
Here are five other truths confirmed by the film, whose title dares to one-up Steven Spielberg's (close encounters of the fourth kind going beyond mere contact with aliens into abduction by them):
1) Mr. Spielberg's reputation is safe.
2) Jittery hand-held cameras can't create drama, only nausea.
3) Mr. Osunsanmi's chutzpah exceeds his skill.
4) Mr. Osunsanmi is skillful all the same, having made something out of little more than a clever idea in the hallowed tradition of "The Blair Witch Project," plus a couple of truly scary moments.
5) In the age of the Internet, everything is true unless proven otherwise, so "The Fourth Kind" will abduct a scary share of this week's audience.
'The Wedding Song'
"The Wedding Song" takes place in Tunis in 1942, just as Nazis troops are occupying the North African capital. Karin Albou's sensuous, leisurely drama doesn't explore the setting so much as draw subdued energy from it. The center of the story is occupied by two girls coming of age in fearful circumstances: Nour (Olympe Borval), who is Muslim, and her best friend Myriam (Lizzie Brocheré), who is a Sephardic Jew. Each girl envies the other's life, and their envy is equally misguided, since the man Nour hopes to marry cannot match her romantic expectations, while Myriam's religion, and the wealthy man she's being forced to marry, threaten to be her undoing.
A small-scale feature made with modest resources, "The Wedding Song" seeks, and finds, larger meaning as a multipurpose parable: of the Nazi message of hate that divides cherished friends, of oppressed Arabs misapprehending the roots of their oppression and blaming oppressed Jews. The movie's distinction, however, lies in two lovely performances, and in the passion and pain of parallel lives—both girls suffering at the hands of men, both struggling to understand the brutality of the world they must share.
In a DVD recommendation last week I mistakenly said that Leslie Caron won an Oscar for her performance in the title role of the 1953 "Lili." The best-actress Oscar that year was won by Audrey Hepburn for "Roman Holiday."
DVD FOCUS
"A Christmas Carol"(1951)
Just in case you were wondering, or somehow forgot, this is the definitive choice among all the feature versions extant (though I do have a soft spot for Bill Murray's "Scrooged"). Alastair Sim, gimlet-eyed and gleefully acidulous, is Scrooge, Mervyn Johns is Bob Cratchit, Hermione Baddely is Mrs. Cratchit, Kathleeen Harrison is Mrs. Dilber and Michael Hordern is Jacob Marley in the flesh and as a ghost. The director was Brian Desmond Hurst. A colorized version is available, for those who fancy heresy. For everyone else, the black-and-white photography (by C.M. Pennington-Richards) does right by Dickens and puts subsequent shooters in the shade.
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977)
Sometimes you just have to state the obvious. For all the times it's been shown on TV, re-released in theaters or repackaged on DVD, Steven Spielberg's shining, glowing masterpiece will never wear out its welcome. I watch it whenever it turns up, and think of it whenever I drive the 405 freeway north from Westwood at night, reach the crest of the hill and look down on the San Fernando Valley, whose twinkling lights supposedly inspired the design of the film's spaceship. Vilmos Zsigmond was director of photography, and Douglas Trumbull supervised the visual effects.
"Days of Glory" (2006)
Foreign distributors found a forgettable English title for "Indigènes," an unforgettable drama about Algerian soldiers fighting in the French army in World War II. The French title translates to "natives," but with a strongly ironic connotation. The soldiers in question, dust-poor volunteers from Algeria who had never set foot on French soil, fought valiantly to liberate the motherland from Nazi rule. Yet their fellow French soldiers called them "natives" or worse, used them as cannon fodder, and saw them as subhuman scum. The spare, sharp-eyed direction was by Rachid Bouchareb, who worked from a splendid script by Olivier Lorelle.
Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com