Jim Carrey, buried in green fur, is funnier and sadder than anything around him. Ron Howard’s Whoville is enormous, loud and wall-to-wall with product, and by the time the film remembers the small story it came from, we were worn out.
Dr Seuss’s book about a green hermit who takes a town’s Christmas away in the night is short enough to read aloud before bed, and it was filmed once before, as a half-hour cartoon in 1966. Ron Howard’s version runs 105 minutes. Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman’s script therefore has to invent most of what is on screen, and what they invented is where the film is won and lost.
They give the Grinch (Jim Carrey) a childhood, a school bully who grew up to be Mayor Augustus Maywho (Jeffrey Tambor), a lost sweetheart in Martha May Whovier (Christine Baranski), and a small interrogator in Cindy Lou Who (Taylor Momsen), who wants to know why he hates the holiday and goes up the mountain to ask. They also turn Whoville into a town of shoppers, queuing and elbowing under the Mayor’s slogans. Michael Corenblith’s production design gives them a place to do it: curling streets and leaning chimneys with no straight line anywhere, and Donald Peterman lights it in pink and gold through a soft haze, so the whole place looks like the inside of a sweet tin. The Grinch’s cave up on Mount Crumpit is grey, green and stacked with rubbish. Rita Ryack’s costumes run to tartan, fur trim and bustles, and the Whos under them have been fitted with upturned noses and too many teeth, which is faithful to the drawings and slightly alarming in the flesh.
Carrey is the reason to watch. He plays the Grinch as a creature who has organised his misery: he keeps an afternoon diary of despair, talks to his dog as if to a disappointing colleague, and bounces off the cave walls in fur that hides everything but his eyes and mouth, and still gets more out of those than most actors get from a whole face. We laughed more than we expected, and mostly in the cave, because Carrey plays loneliness as a routine the Grinch has got good at, and because the film leaves him alone long enough to do it. When he mutters an aside, it is usually the best line in the scene, and it usually sounds like his own.
The people around him fare less well. Momsen is quiet and earnest and is asked mainly to look worried and ask questions. Tambor is good, a petty man in a large hat who says the right things about Christmas and means none of them. Baranski enjoys herself with a rifle that fires fairy lights. Bill Irwin, as Cindy Lou’s father Lou Lou Who, gets some decent physical business with a mountain of parcels, and Molly Shannon as her mother Betty Lou Who gets a contest over house lights and not much else. Josh Ryan Evans plays the Grinch at eight in a schoolroom flashback that is the film’s one quiet, sad scene, and it is over in a few minutes.
The trouble is the volume. Mike Hill and Daniel P. Hanley cut the town into short bursts, James Horner lays sleigh bells and a choir over nearly all of it, and every Who is shouting. The script’s idea is that Whoville has forgotten what Christmas is for, and the film makes that point by staging ninety minutes of the excess it is complaining about, lit handsomely and paid for the same way. By the hour mark we were tired of being shouted at, and we noticed we were tired, which a children’s film should never let you do. The final stretch, which we will not describe, gets the book’s moral out in a hurry, as if somebody had checked the time.
Howard’s films are usually tidy, level and patient with their people. This one is none of those, and he seems to have decided that Seuss meant chaos and gone about it methodically. The 1966 cartoon got the story done with a narrator, a song and a dog with one antler; this one has a full town and less feeling in it.
Children of about seven will take the noise and the fur as the point, and the PG holds, though the Grinch’s face in close-up may be a lot for the smallest. Adults get Carrey, who is worth the evening on his own. Expect the children to want the merchandise afterwards, which is not a request the film has earned the right to grumble about.
