|
how
the grinch stole christmas |
director
Ron Howard
screenwriters
Jeffrey
Price
Peter S. Seaman
based on
the book by
Dr. Seuss
producers
Brian Grazer
Ron Howard
cinematographer
Donald Peterman
music
James Horner
editors
Daniel P. Hanley
Mike Hill
cast
Jim Carrey (Grinch)
Taylor Momsen (Cindy Lou Who)
Jeffrey Tambor (Mayor)
Christine Baranski (Martha May Whovier)
Bill Irwin (Lou Lou Who)
Molly Shannon (Betty Lou Who)
Clint Howard (Whobris)
Josh Ryan Evans (8-Year Old Grinch)
Anthony Hopkins (The Narrator)
mpaa rating: PG
running
time: 104m
u.s.
release: November 17,
2000
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other ron
howard films
reviewed on this website:
- Apollo
13
- A
Beautiful Mind
- Ed
TV
- Ransom
see also:
- the
cat in the hat
|
You
don't have to have a heart two sizes too small to recoil from
the new live-action version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
What began life as a brief, elegant little work by the children's-book
master Dr. Seuss -- and went on, nine years after its publication,
to become a beloved Dr. Seuss/Chuck Jones TV perennial -- is
now a jumbled mess, art-directed to within an inch of its life,
a folly to put alongside previous Christmas turkeys like Hook
and Santa Claus: The Movie. Not since Battlefield
Earth (admittedly, a much worse film) have so much effort
and design gone into something so ... tacky.
Boris Karloff narrated the 1966 cartoon, so it must have made
sense to hire another movie boogeyman, Anthony Hopkins, to preside
over the new film. Sounding remote and bored, Hopkins tells us
about a place -- Whoville -- that exists inside a snowflake,
and thanks to computer animation, we zoom right into that snowflake
and into a panoramic view of Whoville in one unbroken shot, like
a vision of smallness and largeness all at once. This should
feel thrilling and magical, but, like so much else in the film,
it's so slick and artificial that you respond to it as a jaded
connoisseur of special effects. (It's also, of late, an overdone
effect -- it's basically the kiddie-flick version of the opening
shot of Fight
Club.)
We skim over the Whos of Whoville; they include vibrant actors
like Molly Shannon, Jeffrey Tambor, and Christine Baranski, smothered
in pug-nose latex that throws their faces out of whack, like
Jack Nicholson's fake shnoz in Hoffa. One of them, a little
girl named Cindy Lou Who (Taylor Momsen), is uncomfortable with
the rampant consumerism of Whoville and also can't understand
why everyone in town is terrified of one figure -- a hermit living
on a mountaintop on the outskirts of Whoville, called the Grinch,
who hates Christmas, Whoville, and Who-manity in general. Given
the obnoxiousness of the shopaholic Whos, I can't blame him.
Unless you've been living on a mountaintop yourself, you've heard
that Jim Carrey plays the Grinch -- "a role he was born
to play," we've been assured. I'm not so sure. Carrey gives
it his all, and beneath Rick Baker's supple make-up he manages
to project his personality. That's the problem. How the Grinch
Stole Christmas unavoidably becomes a Jim Carrey vehicle,
a cluttered stage upon which he can prance, pout, preen, and
gnaw large holes through the scenery, inexhaustible and, finally,
exhausting. He's an ingenious comic actor -- I thought he was
robbed of an Oscar for Man
on the Moon -- but Carrey, with the help of an overexplicit
script by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman (Who Framed Roger
Rabbit), gives the Grinch a neurotic, nobody-loves-me pathos
that doesn't quite fit. The Grinch shouldn't have issues,
for God's sake -- he's just the Grinch, a Seussian Scrooge
who's just mean because ... well, as Seuss said, "No one
quite knows the reason."
We find out the reason, all right; in flashbacks, we see poor
little Grinch as a misfit child, ignored by the girl he loves.
And Cindy Lou Who is certain the Grinch could learn to be kind
if kindness were only shown to him. So we get an awkward sequence
in which the Grinch is elected the town's Cheermeister, which,
like most of the scenes, has no beginning or end; it just arrives,
putters around, and peters out. (The new subplots tacked onto
Seuss' original, far simpler tale add nothing but flab.) This
is not director Ron Howard's finest hour; he seems so in awe
of the elaborate sets and the elaborate stylings of his star
that he hardly bothers to shape the scenes -- he must have figured
Carrey and the set design would do his work for him.
Well, they did, and not to the movie's benefit. How the Grinch
Stole Christmas is a garish rummage sale, in which Hollywood's
great Tasmanian Devil Jim Carrey must suffer the ultimate indignity:
not the painful latex, not the crude slapstick, but the plot
that requires him to learn to feel. If he isn't careful
he'll turn into Robin Williams, who has gotten in touch with
his emotions in so many movies that his emotions should
really slap a restraining order on him. Comedians used to want
to play Hamlet; now they want to be therapists. And the movie's
moral (Christmas is about more than presents) would mean more
if we didn't know that store shelves will be packed with Grinch
merchandise from now till December 26. |