It seemed inevitable that Robert Zemeckis would eventually dig his meat hooks into Dickens’s 1843 novella, and that Jim Carrey would play several roles in it, including literature’s curmudgeon par excellence, Ebenezer Scrooge. The book is teeming with cinematic possibilities. One can almost picture Zemeckis, chief practitioner of the 3-D performance capture technique known as mocap, eyeing it like a Christmas goose. Mocap is one of those contentious cinematic developments that seems to divide people into various camps. One camp will explain how it allows visually creative directors to maneuver the camera however they like within an abstract space, and is therefore a useful tool, akin to the Steadicam or the greenscreen. The other camp will maintain that the process is too easy, that it makes a mockery of traditional animation, and that it can’t replicate certain movements, especially those that don’t adhere to the laws of physics. There is yet another camp that takes the moral high ground, arguing that it has an almost satanic dehumanizing effect, turning actors into weird facsimiles of human beings and stifling any meaningful drama.  

All camps will find plenty to fuel their arguments in A Christmas Carol, an exhilarating excursion into Dickensian darkness that carries almost none of the emotional gravity of Dickens. Even those who haven’t read the book are familiar with the story: the cold, the miser, the ghosts, the redemption. But what is often overlooked is the fact that no other popular author dedicated himself to describing human happiness in all its shapes and qualities. Just as the word “Hitchcockian” evokes a certain atmosphere, the word “Dickensian” describes a certain texture—one that oscillates between stark despair and profound joy. There is no more moving a passage in A Christmas Carol (the book) than the depiction of the Cratchit family dinner. Their camaraderie and excitement overwhelms the fact of their dire poverty. It’s a shame then that Zemeckis is able to evoke only one half of Dickens (the fear, the snow, the grotesquerie), and not the other.

Not that Dickens isn’t frightening. After all, the book is a ghost story, and this is where the technology comes in handy. Marley’s ghost is a freakish wonder, ash-gray, baleful, literally blind (!), and under constant threat of decay. When he gets excited, his lower jaw dislocates and hangs perilously from the rest of his skull. Zemeckis may be the only filmmaker to give a faithful rendering of the Ghost of Christmas Past, described by its author as a “bright, clear jet of light,” albeit one with Jim Carrey’s leering face. And who else would have thought to make the flesh dissolve from the Ghost of Christmas Present’s bones as he dies a hideous midnight death? This is scary stuff, and satisfying in that sense, although it leaves little room for delight when Scrooge finally runs out into the snow in his nightgown.  

Carrey is only so-so as Scrooge. He spits his lines out quickly in a way that makes you long for Alastair Sim. He seems to be having the most fun as the lewd, flickering flame of Christmas Past. Of the main actors (among whom can be spotted Colin Firth, Bob Hoskins and Robin Wright Penn), only Gary Oldman as Bob Cratchit manages to pierce his digital shell to give an affecting performance. Zemeckis and his “camera” are the real stars, and while he seems too infatuated with diving, swooping movements, the tour-of-London title sequence is a marvel, and it’s hard to protest the use of flowing long takes over frantic cutting.

A Christmas Carol has been advertised by Disney (who couldn’t resist branding the title with their familiar signature) as an experience, and it surely is that—in three-dimensional color. But the film, while reasonably faithful to the text, has a digital heart. Anybody familiar with Dickens will feel an opportunity has been lost.