Delayed Reaction: Spirited

Premise: Imagine if A Christmas Carol was something a magical group did every year and this year, they might've met their match.

Christmas just isn't a very malleable sub-genre. It's virtually impossible to break into the cannon with something new. You're pretty much doing a Jesus Christmas, a Santa Christmas, a Christmas carol, or a movie that really isn't about Christmas but uses it heavily as a backdrop. It's painfully hard to break into it with something new, so I've accepted that as long as I'm going to like Christmas movies, I'm going to see a new take on A Christmas Carol virtually every year.

 

All things considered, Spirited is an inventive enough slant on the story. It applies Santa's Workshop logic to A Christmas Carol by creating this group of - I guess - ghosts who bring Christmas cheer one curmudgeon at a time. And if that's not enough, it's a musical too. Will Ferrell gets to dust off a lot of his Buddy the Elf charm. Ryan Reynolds gets to do that smarmy Ryan Reynolds thing that I never really get tired of. And I continue to love how Octavia Spencer has built her career over the years. She was a character actor for years, then turned one big break (The Help) into something more sustainable that anyone imagined. She'll show up in Oscar nominees while still doing comedies that don't tarnish her reputation.

 

A Christmas Carol has been so thoroughly explored over the years that no one is coming up with anything truly clever about it anymore. The ins and outs of this magical world in Spirited are thought out to an extent, but it never makes total sense. You do hit a "just go with it" point. The movie gets way too lost in trying to prove that it's clever. Individual elements like Ryan Reynolds' ability to break through the facade, Will Ferrell's origin, and the switcheroo at the end are all good ideas, but there are too many of them. This movie doesn't breeze by. It's over 2 hours and feels like it. To put it another way, did the intricacies of this movie mean it had to be 20 minutes longer than the puzzle box that is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?

 

The songs are pretty good. I doubt the soundtrack will become a sensation, but there are a lot of earworms. Sean Anders has a special gift for making this kind of pleasant family comedy. All things considered, this could end up being a good third or even second tier Christmas classic.

 

Side Note: I always have Stranger Than Fiction on the brain, so the end of this movie was an odd experience for me. Stranger Than Fiction ends with Will Ferrell's Harold Crick getting hit by a bus, but in a bout of a writer relenting, he survives miraculously. In Spirited, Ryan Reynolds pushes Ferrell out of the way of a bus and dies. I believe they even point out that of course he would die. I highly doubt this was any sort of commentary or allusion to Stranger Than Fiction, but I'm going to treat it like it was.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend