I re-watched Ron Howard’s 2000 film Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas this week as one of the Christmas movies I saw this season. It wasn’t particularly well received when it came out but I have come into contact with a surprising number of people who have a great nostalgia for it. I hadn’t seen it in quite a few years, but I’m glad I revisited it now. I didn’t enjoy it, it’s a pretty terrible movie, but I’m glad I gave it another chance.
The worst thing about this movie is that it doesn’t seem to understand the source material, or Dr. Seuss in general, really. In the original story, The Grinch hates the Whos down in Whoville and that’s all we know. The narrator even tells us not to worry about why, though it does then offer the explanation that The Grinch’s heart is simply too small. The Whos, meanwhile, are total innocents, seemingly oblivious to The Grinch, as little Cindy Lou Who doesn’t recognize him as The Grinch when he’s in her house, but accepts him as Santa Claus. Here in this movie, adapted by writers Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman (coming off their even more awful adaptation of Wild Wild West), The Grinch is shown to be a sort of boogeyman to the Whos, almost a Voldemort as they cringe at the name itself, much less his presence. The Grinch is given a backstory of being bullied by the Whos when he was in elementary school, helping lead him to his Grinchy ways (although he was also unpleasant to start with). He then runs away to Mount Krumpit where he revels in the trash that the Whos dump there, wallowing in self-hatred and self pity and mostly generic dislike of the Whos.
The problems here are almost already too many to mention, as there’s no bullying in the world of Seuss, at least not of the generic kind shown here. Even in something like The Lorax, The Onceler doesn’t actively bully The Lorax, he just doesn’t heed his advice and pays the consequences for it. Here, we don’t need a backstory where The Grinch was a victim of the horrible bullying of the Whos, and in fact all of that is antithetical to the characters themselves. The Grinch is made the misunderstood hero, while the Whos are awful creatures who mock The Grinch for being different. This is an unnecessary and unexplainable reversal of character that is never really addressed. The handling of the backstory itself is actually pretty good and self-contained, I think it works. It might explain why The Grinch hates Christmas and the Whos. But is it needed? I don’t really think so. We don't need to understand how The Grinch was victimized as a child. He's The Grinch, that's all we need to know.
The Whos are also shown to be materialistic and shallow, celebrating and reveling in the commercialism of Christmas. All except for Cindy Lou Who (Taylor Momsen, giving a really nice child actor performance), who is taken from being in two pages of the book, and expanded into the co-star of the whole piece. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but Cindy doesn’t do much other than be the moral champion that nobody listens to until the finale when everyone suddenly listens to her and they all live happily ever after. I understand that there may need to be expansion of character and story when going from a 60-ish page children’s picture book to a full length feature movie, and so Cindy Lou Who is a fine choice to expand, but there’s really not a character there. She starts as the moral center nobody listens to and ends as the moral center that people listen to because....reasons. But the other Whos, including Cindy’s status quo dad Lou (the great Bill Irwin) and “winning the best Christmas lights contest” obsessed mom Betty (Molly Shannon), as well as the Mayor of Whoville (Jeffrey Tambor) and his girlfriend Martha May (Christine Baranski, who does barely contained femme fatale sexuality better than anyone) are all drawn as shallowly as possible.
Worst of all, I think, is actually The Grinch himself. While Jim Carrey may not seem a terrible choice in theory, as the man at his height is a walking cartoon himself, he’s all wrong for the character here. Carrey is manic when The Grinch should be quietly, even deliciously, menacing. He’s cartoonish when The Grinch should be deeper as a character. The makeup, which deservedly won an Oscar, transforms Carrey into looking like a terrific Grinchy lead, but he doesn’t seem to understand the character, and that’s a problem when he’s the star. Even in the finale, when Carrey really does the emotional heavy lifting of having The Grinch realize the true meaning of Christmas, he’s tremendous, only to undercut it with what should have put the emotion over-the-top (the growing of The Grinch’s heart) into really turning on the tears, Carrey goes for a wacky “it feels like I’m having a heart attack” buffoonery instead of staying in the emotion of the moment. It all amounts to nothing, and even negates the good work he does do here.
But Carrey isn’t the only one at fault, as the movie itself also doesn’t understand the story and goes for manic when it should be going for magic. The movie is both too long (at 104 minutes) and also too shallow to justify even a full length feature, much less one over an hour and a half. It has a couple of songs, but very short ones, like it was originally going to be a musical adaptation, but they changed that at the last minute. Overall it’s just an unpleasant experience. None of the magical whimsy of Seuss is captured, and even the nastiness of The Grinch isn’t entertaining, it’s off-putting. There are plenty of sexual innuendo’s in the script, as well as more adult material like The Grinch pulling a bottle of alcohol out of a Whos pocket to drink. Who are these things for? They’re not from Seuss. They’re not in the spirit of Seuss. They’re not ultimately for anybody, really. They don’t work in or out of the context of the story.
This movie as a whole doesn’t work. It may not be as bad as the mind-numbing animated feature adaptation of The Lorax was, but it’s bad. The animated TV specials of both The Lorax (from 1972) and The Grinch (from 1966) are really tremendous and are still what should be watched by everyone. They’re in the spirit of Seuss (as Seuss was involved with them) and capture what the man and his stories were really about. Watch them, show them to your kids, not this.
