A Christmas Carol

Robert Zemeckis’s 2009 film takes Dickens’s miser Ebenezer Scrooge through one Christmas Eve, visited by the ghost of his partner Jacob Marley, then by the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. It was made with performance capture: the actors worked with no sets inside the field of infrared light Zemeckis calls the volume, and he says the one condition is staying inside it. Carrey describes having no references and building the mood in his head. Jim Carrey plays Scrooge young, middle aged and old, and all three spirits, so most confrontations are one actor meeting himself; Cary Elwes stood in when two of them shared a frame. Gary Oldman carries three parts too: Bob Cratchit, Marley and the capture for Tiny Tim. Much of the dialogue comes straight from Dickens. Zemeckis argues that for a redemption story to work its subject must be plunged into darkness, and he does not trim those passages. Disney promoted it with a forty city train tour out of Los Angeles in May 2009, carrying loans from the Charles Dickens Museum. A good fit if you want the lines to be Dickens’s own and are curious about one performer holding Scrooge and all three spirits. Not for a family opening it with small children; the dark passages are deliberately unsoftened.