The Grinch
All We Still Have Time To Regain
One of the old theater stories is about the bad German actor who was booed when he was playing Hamlet. He turned to the audience, and said, “Don’t blame me; I didn’t write this crap.”
Ron Howard’s version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas is not Shakespeare, but it draws from the work of five other spectacular talents. The story itself is derived from the greatest English short story, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, fused with the work of the great American poet and illustrator Thomas Nast, creator of The Night Before Christmas. The two stories were refined and cast into deathless rhyme by the legendary Dr. Seuss. Then, all the elements found their highest expression in the Chuck Jones cartoon, as narrated by Boris Karloff.
This is a lot for Howard to live up to; imagine bringing dessert to a potluck dinner at Julia Child’s, or picking out paint chips for a Frank Lloyd Wright house, or choosing the cover art for a Larry McMurtry novel. No matter how good a job Howard did in directing the live-action version of The Grinch, or how good a job that Jim Carrey did in playing the part, the film version was bound to be a disappointment at some level.
The Grinch excels to the extent that it is faithful to the source material, and fails badly when it departs from it. The most successful aspect of the movie is its visual design, which is as faithful to the Seuss drawings as it is possible to be. Every bangle, every bauble, every car and every Who and every present is translated from the static two-dimensional page to vibrant, glowing three-dimensional life. Both the teeming streets of Whoville and the lonely squalor of the Grinch’s lair atop Mount Crumpit are masterpieces of the lively art of set design, and are by far the best thing about the transition to live-action.
Most of the movie’s failings can be evenly divided between the weaknesses in Carrey’s performance and the holes in the plot. Carrey has obviously — and wrongly — taken Robin Williams’s bravura performance in Aladdin too much to heart, throwing most of his lines over the heads of the youngsters in the audience in an attempt to draw some cynical, postmodern laughs out of the adults. Combine this with the characteristic Carrey exaggerated physical comedy, and a snarly, grinding delivery, and the Grinch is hard to take, hard to watch.
Furthermore, we’re with the Grinch for far longer than the original cartoon, and the first hour of the movie covers ground outside the original story. The new material covers the Grinch’s origins, almost as if he were one of the X-Men, and it’s pretty awful. The lowest points come from veteran sitcom actors Jeffrey Tambor and Christine Baranski, who play two completely extraneous Whoville denizens. (Oh, and there’s Clint “I Really Need A Job, Ron” Howard as Tambor’s weasel of an aide.) Nothing they do — other than Baranski’s wielding of a fantastic Seuss contraption — advances the plot or is worthy of the audience’s time and interest.
Although the first half of the movie is just awfully acted and awfully written, the one thing it does well is satirize the overcommercialized nature of Christmas. (Which satire, of course, the movie itself betrays by its countless commercial tie-ins, but that’s another story.) The Grinch counterparts the relentless hustle and bustle of a Whoville Christmas with the sad-eyed musings of Cindy Lou Who (Taylor Momsen), who wonders if the real meaning of Christmas is being lost among the presents and the ribbons and the bows.
It’s a resonant phrase in the movie, and in countless others, this “real meaning of Christmas”, and it’s always assumed that the audience knows what it is without being told. It’s worthwhile, though, to explore it. The Christian conception of Christmas is the beginning of the process of redemption and reconciliation that ends with Calvary and the Resurrection. Is it any wonder, then, that the most often-told stories at Christmas — those of Ebenezer Scrooge, George Bailey, Charlie Brown, and even Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer — are stories of hope and reconciliation? It is that story that the The Grinch tells, and the true measure of the movie is how well it tells it.
As everyone should know, the pivotal moment of the movie occurs with the Grinch triumphant on top of Mount Crumpit, preparing to dump the Whoville Christmas presents to the valley below, but hearing the sounds of the Christmas carols echoing from the town. The Grinch hears the song and it touches him in a way he doesn’t fully understand. The movie can only be successful if that same song touches the audience, brings us back to a spirit of reconciliation, reminds us of who we were before and all we’ve lost and all we still have time to regain.
The Grinch is a mediocre movie at best, with poor acting from much of the principals balanced out against expert and gorgeous set design. But no amount of Carrey mugging, no amount of extraneous plot points, no amount of Hollywood claptrap can hide the subtle power of the great Seuss story or the awesome promise of redemption and reconciliation. That The Grinch succeeds despite the obstacles it places in its own path may be the closest thing to a Christmas miracle we can expect this season.