The Travolta/Cage Project #64 Christmas Carol: The Movie (2001)
Over the course of this project, I have sometimes found myself wondering, “Why am I watching this?”
The answer invariably is because it’s a movie John Travolta or Nicolas Cage are in and consequently I need to watch it and write about it and discuss it with Clint Worthington and a plethora of amazing guests for the Travolta/Cage podcast.
I found myself asking that question throughout 2001’s Christmas Carol: The Movie and this time the usual answers proved unsatisfactory. With a runtime of seventy-five minutes unnecessarily padded with a live-action framing sequence that adds nothing but length, Christmas Carol: The Movie is, despite its title, just barely a movie.
Even more frustratingly for me, Clint and our guest, Christmas Carol: The Movie is just barely a movie and Cage is barely in it.
The Academy-Award winning icon is prominently billed for the key role of Marley, Ebenezer Scrooge’s late business partner but he’s in the movie for mere minutes and could easily have recorded the entire role in a boozy half hour.
That’s the great thing about voiceovers: you don’t have to memorize any lines and you can record them while clad in your pajamas and a bathrobe while hungover and half-awake.
Animation is an incredibly time and labor-intensive process, particularly conventional animation, but voiceovers can be knocked off in next to no time.
Cage clearly didn’t spend a lot of time in the studio recording and re-recording his lines over and over again obsessively as he painstakingly strived to create the perfect spooky ghost cadence.
If Cage delivered a line more than once it was a waste of the poor man’s time and energy. Hell, even if he got it all done in one take Christmas Carol: The Movie still represents an unfortunate and complete waste of Cage’s extraordinary gifts.
Cage’s presence in Christmas Carol: The Movie is so brief and inconsequential that if I’d seen the movie before embarking upon this project I would not even bother including it in the Travolta/Cage and The Travolta/Cage Project canon. Instead, I would have relegated it to the lesser realm of the Travolta/Cage Extra, alongside such obscurities as 1981’s The Best of Times, the Laugh-In for teens-style pilot that marked Cage’s debut and Our Friend, Martin a cartoon special where we learned that racism is bad but Martin Luther King was good.
That way our guest would not have to waste his time with a non-entity like Christmas Carol: The Movie. Truth be told, I’m not sure I should have bothered with Christmas Carol: The Movie either and as we have established indelibly, my time is not terribly valuable!
When I saw an animated version of A Christmas Carol in Cage’s credits I foolishly assumed that it was the Robert Zemeckis CGI version starring his good friend and Peggy Sue Got Married co-star Jim Carrey.
It was not! Though I approach late-period Robert Zemeckis movies with dread rather than anticipation, Zemeckis’ take on Dickens was at least going for something in using newfangled technology (motion-capture assisted CGI animation) to tell a beloved old story.
Christmas Carol: The Movie takes some liberties with its sacred source material but its additions don’t end up adding anything significant and often distract from the classic story’s raw emotional power.
The unnecessary embellishments begin with a pointless live-action framing device that finds Charles Dickens (Simon Callow) performing for a packed Boston crowd that includes some animated mice that steal the show.
The legendary author assures us that he’s going to tell the story of A Christmas Carol in a way he never quite has before.
This is not your daddy’s A Christmas Carol! Well, actually, it is, but with the aggravating addition of a pair of anthropomorphic mice who pop up intermittently as comic relief and a sop to the kiddies.
These mice do not talk, thank God, but they communicate through body language and gestures. They’re obnoxious little rodent mimes forever engaged in a pointless game of Charades with no winners, only losers.
They’re on hand because children love animals, and if the popularity of Mickey Mouse is any indication, they particularly dig cute versions of disease-spreading vermin. But the little animals with the great big personalities are also here to undercut the decidedly adult gloominess of Dickens’ classic morality tale.
In hindsight, it’s pretty fucking weird that a story about a bitter, hateful old man coming to terms with the spiritual emptiness of a wasted, selfish and lonely life is considered quintessential family fare for small children.
In Christmas Carol: The Movie, Scrooge is considerably younger than he is in other iterations. He’s deep into middle age rather than an old man at the end of a harsh, cruel life.
Christmas Carol: The Movie also dramatically beefs up the role of Ebenezer’s ex-fiancé Belle (Kate Winslet). In other incarnations of the story Scrooge is tormented by the image of the love of his life as a wife and mother who has found contentment with someone else but here she remains single so that our boy Young Scrooge (which incidentally was my rap moniker back in the day) has a shot at love as well as redemption.
Christmas Carol: The Movie opens with Ebenezer Scrooge humbugging his way through another miserable Christmas Eve as the cruelest capitalist in all of England.
It’s all about hurling the poor, shivering masses into debtor’s prisons and antagonizing poor Tiny Tim until Ebenezer is visited by Marley’s Ghost, who warns him that he will be visited by a series of spirits representing Christmas past, present and future.
The character design in Christmas Carol: The Movie is bland and inelegant, ugly and frightfully unimaginative but when the action moves from the dreary machinations of Scrooge to the spirit world the animation begins to take flight.
Christmas Carol: The Movie was directed by Jimmy T. Murakami, who is best known for directing the Roger Corman-produced Star Wars knockoff Battle Beyond the Stars and a pair of critically acclaimed animated adaptations of Raymond Briggs books, The Snowman and When the Wind Blows.
Murakami gives a past that can be contemplated and mourned but never revisited or corrected an aching, sad, melancholy beauty and the Ghost of Christmas Present’s vision of what can be a sense of kaleidoscopic splendor.
At its trippy best, Christmas Carol: The Movie forgets the angry demands of Dickens’ yarn and gives itself over to surreal spectacle. It’s a head film for kids or at least it would be if the plot didn’t focus so intently on such non-child friendly subject matter as debtor’s prisons and romantic regrets and the unthinkable sadism of the free market untethered to morality and social responsibility.
Though it has its share of gorgeous animation and dazzling tableaus, Christmas Carol: The Movie ultimately operates at cross purposes. The pandering funny animal nonsense involving mice with annoyingly human personalities pitches the proceedings at the level of small, stupid children but pretty much everything else belongs in a drearily adult realm, except perhaps the Christ-like suffering of good old Tiny Tim.
For all of its failed attempts to be different, this is ultimately a Christmas Carol like every other. Even Cage completists don’t need to bother with it, since he’s a ghostly, decidedly minor presence at best.
I’m legitimately a little annoyed that I even bothered watching this so I encourage you, dear reader, to learn from my mistake and be sure never to watch a sleepy, forgettable take on a story that has been told countless times before and in better, more memorable ways.
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