Who among us is brave enough to take on yet another adaption of the perennial Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol?
Why, yes, Sean Anders I see you raising your hand, emboldened by a clever, witty, wildly original script you co-wrote with John Morris and bolstered by the presence of Ryan Reynolds, Will Ferrell and Octavia Spencer in your musically-oriented take on the immortal tale of redemption at Christmas when as we all know, life gives everyone a chance to change tack in life.
Or, that’s the theory anyway; one moment you’re a terrible human being, scamming the poor out of turkeys and a long life or manipulating people for crass commercial gain, and then, BAM!, you are a good and kind person stopping to help old ladies and kittens across the street.
We all love, or most of us do anyway, A Christmas Carol because it entices us with this idea that redemption is instantaneous and total, a wholly expansive ticking of the goodness box that reorients our life to something that means a damn and will affect people for long-lasting good.
But what if, wonders Sean Anders, if Dickens’ redemptive ideal is not quite straightforward and life is a good deal more complicated, especially in a 21st century world where self-awareness is rampant, meta is king and postmodernism is tipping old certainties rather messily on their idealistic heads?
In the world of Spirited, which bravely takes on adapting Dickens’ classic tale knowing that if you do it, you have to go big or go hauntedly home, everything you thought you knew about ghosts of whatever chronological period is happily upended, a vast apparatus that started back in the Marley/Scrooge days – Marley (Patrick Page) in fact runs the enterprise which has a massive number of ghost personnel making bad people good – is revealed and we discover that it is possible to turn your life around with the aid of Christmas Eve hauntings, some dubiously immersive therapy and a set routine which depends on people’s souls getting a good old epiphanic cleanout.
As wild takes on an iconic, well-worn tale go, Spirited is inspiredly brilliant.
It takes all the tropes you know, inverts and subverts with a gleeful musicality and breathtakingly fun and intense set pieces, courtesy of Dominic Lewis’s score and Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s songs (The Greatest Showman, La La Land) and infuses with a playfully perfect balance of comedy and drama, whimsy and some good old fashioned existential angsting.
It also clearly has the budget to go big too with Reynolds, who plays the latest target of Christmas Eve redemption, Clint Briggs, who is a lobbyist-eseque gun for hire who cares not how much damage he does to others if he gets his way – although as he points out to the Ghost of Christmas Present, played with wide-eyed vulnerability and world-wearied, gee-whiz enthusiasm ( yes, the two can co-exist) by Will Ferrell, there are murderers and people who do gender reveal parties and you’re picking me to fix up? – changing outfits a good three times in his first big musical number.
And if you’re worried about a Pierce Brosnan moment of atonal musical disruption, fear not, everyone can actually sing, their ability to holding a tune keeping you in some very fine moments with big epic pieces that thunder and rumble merrily with emotional heft and festive revelation, and which neatly capture how change may not be as easy or as instantaneous as we might like to think.
That’s the central fun of Spirited – it plays around ding dong merrily on high with the idea that maybe it’s not just the object of redemptive possibility that needs a good old soul makeover but perhaps the ghosts of Christmas Present (mainly, who forms a strong, wholly unscripted and unusual bond with his mark), Past (Sunita Mani who unprofessionally but hilariously has the hots for Clint) and Yet to Come (Loren G. Woods actor/ Tracy Morgan the voice, who’s amusingly sick of just pointing wordlessly) and the whole apparatus that supports their ostensibly good work.
Perhaps they need a little of their own medicine, not because they have slipped back into old ways – although Spirited does an exemplary, affecting job of musing about whether the kind of change Dickens championed can truly last in a world as prone to backsliding and self interest as ours – but because they still long for good and perfect things, like the Ghost of Christmas Present pines for Clint’s morally conflicted Executive Vice President, Kimberly played by Octavia Spencer with great wit and verve, who might just help him answer the ages-old question of whether he is permanently redeemed.
There is, as a result of all those characters musically and with dialogues that snaps and sizzles with improvisational vivacity – watching Ferrell and Reynolds go back and forth on Tiny Tim’s real name is hilarious and one of those scenes you want to rewatch as often as you can because its just so damn clever and funny – a lot going on in Spirited but it never feels overblown or overdone as it uses CGI magic well to take us across time and Manhattan in pursuit of souls changed for the unending duration.
The kick in the film is that maybe it’s not just Clint who needs to change but everyone and that maybe even the very best of things, and Marley’s supernatural change organisation, which breaks into riotously uplifting song far more than he cares for, needs a good lick and polish and wholesale retune lest it lose its way, not so much into irredeemability but simply ruts big enough to swallow a couple of centuries’ worth of hopes, dreams and unrequited love?
Spirited is a gem, a film that attempts a great deal and pulls off a great deal, replete with songs that surge with blistering life and existential conflicts, characters who actually move beyond one-note enablers of narrative redemption and a script that takes an age-old plot device and makes absolutely merry and bright with it to such an expansively huge extent that you are awed and delighted by it while being reassured, as you happily sing along, that maybe change is possible, that it can last and that maybe, life’s usual tropes aside, you can have the happy ending you’ve always dreamed of, or if you’re Clint and the Ghost of Christmas Present, the one you didn’t even realise you musically needed.