Flak Magazine: Review of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, 11-22-00

The $55 million How the Grinch Stole Christmas grossed in its first weekend was 100 percent marketing, but word of mouth will secure the movie’s place in the cultural cornucopia. And what words will be mouthed? Oh, it’s funny; it’s not gross; your kids will like it; no one was too scared when I saw the movie; it has a good message; there’s no bad language; you should see that makeup! And all those things are true; Grinch is one of the few success stories of this year, joining Charlie’s Angels and Scary Movie as movies that accomplish exactly what they set out to do as validated by their box office receipts.

Does Grinch warrant other validation as well? Not particularly. Its merits can be rattled off easily: As ever, Jim Carrey (as the Grinch) is really funny ... hey, you, with the rolling eyes, he is. Carrey exercises impeccable timing, physical manipulation and abundant wit like none of his peers, and that he does it under Rick Baker’s see-it-to-believe-it makeup is even more impressive. For kicks, he even underpins the gonzo mugging with acting. Also in the plus column, Grinch is inoffensive in that way parents want movies to be inoffensive (well, make that a qualified plus). And even if Donald Peterman’s cinematography is a little more burnished than befits the tale, Michael Corenblith’s production design is truly remarkable and happily evocative of Dr. Seuss.

It’s the only thing that evokes Seuss, however. If you look past all the trademark fractals — the way that mountains and clouds spiral like the Grinch’s crinkly grin — there’s really not a lot of the good doctor at play here. That’s not a liability in and of itself, I guess, since “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” was one of his minor works — the masterpiece was Chuck Jones’s animated adapation (co-produced by Seuss), which is more the inspiration for this movie than the book, anyway. The nearer-to-human appearance of the Whos (the residents of Whoville, which is the town the Grinch besieges), the convoluted names of the Whos’ possessions, snow forming a Santaesque beard on Max the dog, the Grinch’s own greenness — these aspects of the live-action feature were all introduced in the cartoon, not the book (the only color in the book is spot-color red). Some shots are even taken whole cloth from the cartoon, and Carrey’s humor is much more Jones than it is Seuss, so it’s no surprise that the lineage skews the way it does.

But if there’s just a smidgen of Seuss and a helping of Jones — you guessed it — there must be plenty of Ron Howard. The contents of the text and even the cartoon can’t be stretched past 30 minutes, and so if it were just left at,

The Grinch hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!
Now, please don't ask why. No one quite knows the reason.

well, what would the extra hour and 15 minutes be? So Howard and company added the Grinch’s backstory. How a simple disdain for Christmas was irritated by the teasing of his schoolmates (we get both an infant and an adolescent Grinch in addition to full-grown Carrey) to make his heart “two sizes too small,” how the chief instigator is now the mayor of Whoville, etc., blah blah, yawn.

But that’s not enough, either; the Grinch’s realization from the book that "maybe Christmas doesn't come from a store” forms the heart of this anti-consumerism fable whose message is, of course, in no way diminished by the wholesale whoring of the Grinch character to more licensees than I feel good about counting. (Visa’s explicit embrace and rejection of the theme in their 30-second spots would be my favorite if I hadn’t received mail with a Grinch postmark.) Howard co-opts Seuss’s text to make his point; in the book, the lines

And his fib fooled the child. Then he patted her head.
And he got her a drink and he sent her to bed.

refer to the Grinch, dressed as Santa on his Christmas night looting spree, convincing Cindy-Lou Who taking he’s taking their Christmas tree to fix it. In the movie, the lines (intoned by narrator Anthony Hopkins) refer to old Grinchy Claus telling Cindy-Lou (played by Taylor Momsen) that Christmas is about presents.

There’s nothing that says adaptations have to be slavishly faithful to their source texts, and Seuss’s belief that Christmas didn’t come from a store is clear from his book. But playing it this fast and loose — Grinch even disdains rhyming — could only be endorsed if the end product was truly a gem. Grinch is a mess with more structural problems than the Kansas City Hyatt walkway and a message that’s about as subversive as Opie. Grinch’s pleasantness is powered solely by its high production values and Carrey’s magnetism. If either factor contributed just a little less, the whole movie would fall apart.

In a decade starved for holiday movies for its children to call their own — OK, you can have that Miracle on 34th Street remake if you want, but then what? Jingle All the Way? The Santa Clause? The City of Lost Children? — Grinch is certain to be heralded as a Christmas classic and will be harder to shake than Marvin K. Mooney. A sham? A travesty? Not really. Just business as usual when — given a pedigree that includes geniuses like Seuss and Jones — unusual would have been nice.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)