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The Grinch

The Grinch

This article is over 5 years old and may contain outdated information

Dr. Seussā€™ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is about 69 pages long with a paragraphā€™s worth of verse on each page, which broke down into to a 25 minute TV special (spaced out with a pair of songs and commercials) so perfectly back in the ā€˜60s itā€™s been a staple ever since. That should probably have been a clue that trying to turn it into a feature-length film was a bad idea and never going to work, yet somehow now weā€™re on attempt #2 because even though the last try with Jim Carrey was reviled by critics, it was a massive box-office smash. Plus Christmas movies can go into the yearly rotation and become eternally profitable. So now here we go again with The Grinch blown out to movie-length once more.

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This time itā€™s from Illumination, the people who do the Minions movies and (because life is unfair) are currently in charge of the Super Mario movie. Yay. Itā€™s also animated instead of live action and doesnā€™t try to expand the story into a bizarrely overblown anti-consumerist allegory like the prior version. While it still feels the need to give the Grinch an origin story, itā€™s a much more straightforward, less involved or complex one. Otherwise it sticks to Seussā€™ original story more or less faithfully, until it doesnā€™t. But Iā€™ll get to that ā€¦ Benedict Cumberbatch is doing the voice, though as with Doctor Strange the filmmakers bizarrely asked the British actor mainly known for his commanding voice to do an unrecognizable American accent instead. (Occasionally he sounds like heā€™s doing the part as an impression of Paul Giamatti, begging the question: why not just get Paul Giamatti?)

Itā€™s nice at first to realize that weā€™re not going to be dealing with the kind of warped tangential digressions that plagued the Jim Carrey movie ā€” at least until you realize that The Grinchā€™s writers havenā€™t actually filled up all that now empty movie-length space with anything of substance. So while the last try may have been memorably awful, at least it was memorable. This one is primed to vanish from memory even faster than it takes to watch the entire original special. Itā€™s the definition of inoffensively bad. Thereā€™s not really anything seriously ā€œwrongā€ with it because thereā€™s nothing seriously ā€œwith it,ā€ period.

Of course, thereā€™s a school of thought that holds that How the Grinch Stole Christmas! isnā€™t actually one of the richer Dr. Seuss stories, and that we mostly remember it because the payoff is good and the song from the cartoon was so catchy. But Iā€™ve never really bought into that. I honestly think the reason itā€™s had such lasting appeal has a lot to do with the subtly subversive nature of telling whatā€™s ostensibly a Christmas story by spending the whole time following a complete bastard of a protagonist who hates the whole thing and just rants about it nonstop.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas! introduced generations of kids to the idea of a misanthrope protagonist. We donā€™t know why The Grinch is such an asshole. He just kind of is. He spends the whole first half of the story being pissed off, grumbling about what actually is a pretty trying time of year for a lot of people, then gets it in his head to do a bad thing. We watch him plan the bad thing out and actually pull it off. Then it turns out everyoneā€™s fine so then heā€™s fine too and itā€™s a happy ending.

Thereā€™s clearly something cathartic, taboo-busting and vaguely dangerous from a kid perspective in seeing a story about the ā€œhappiest time of the yearā€ where the main character spends 98% of the time stomping around going, ā€œEgh the world sucks and I hate everybody ā€” fuck everything.ā€ For childrenā€™s fare, Mr. Grinch counts as edgy. Heā€™s a bridge between the all-bark grouchery of Sesame Streetā€™s Oscar and an adulthood of identifying (at least some of the time) with the likes of Larry David or George Carlin.

This version is not interested in even that mild degree of edge. Itā€™s big ā€œfreshā€ take on the material is to posit a 21st century Grinch whoā€™s honestly not really very grinchy, at all. Or scary. Or angry. Or particularly mean. Heā€™s mostly just a passive-aggressive loner who avoids other people because heā€™s sad. No, really, thatā€™s it. Thatā€™s the whole thing now: ā€œWhat if instead of an absurdly short-tempered psychotic hermit who snaps, the Grinch is a mildly depressed neurotic dude who doesnā€™t manage seasonal affective disorder very well and eventually escalates for no good reason other than ā€œthatā€™s the story and itā€™s supposed to happen that way.ā€

And, yes ā€” short of actually popping a Seussian Xanax, they really do go all in on this as their ā€œmodernizedā€ take, complete with the language and visuals of modern therapeutic culture. In the new origin story, the Grinch is grew up in an orphanage and never had a family for Christmas, so being around it now gives him sad PTSD flashbacks. When he finds himself surrounded by cheerful Whoville revelers, he looks like heā€™s having an anxiety attack instead of raging or being angry. There are jokes about stress, meditation and ā€œemotional eating.ā€ Thinking on it, you almost want to call the movie out for demonizing depression except, well ā€¦ heā€™s not very demonic.

Heā€™s nice to Max the dog in this version, and heā€™s nice to an actual reindeer that shows up to pad out the runtime in Act 2. He knows what his problem is and has seemingly made peace with his decision about how to handle it. Thereā€™s really zero indication heā€™s going to do the ā€œsteal Christmasā€ thing until he up and decides to do it and when he does, it feels ā€” from the planning up through the execution ā€” like a random pain-in-the-ass prank he decides to pull rather than the original Seuss versionā€™s apocalyptic breaking point. That doesnā€™t leave Cumberbatch much of a character to play, or the film much of a story to tell.

An attempt at a ā€œtwistā€ comes from giving Cindy Lou Who (the little girl who encounters the Grinch and mistakes him for Santa Claus, if youā€™d forgotten) a parallel storyline of her own to provide a reason why sheā€™s deliberately trying to meet Santa face to face. The result is that the revelation that Cindy Lou waited up to ask for something utterly selfless can stick in the Grinchā€™s head and eventually change his heart.

Itā€™s not a bad idea, itā€™s just not especially well executed. By the time it happens weā€™ve spent so much time with both Cindy Lou and The Grinch himself that we already know what sheā€™s going to ask (not as in extrapolation, she just tells us) and how heā€™s likely to react. Hell, itā€™s not even a change of heart since weā€™ve already seen him be decent and sensitive to Max, the reindeer, and his own wounded psyche. Thereā€™s just no problem to be fixed here: no conflict, no drama.

On the other hand, as a nothing movie at least it didnā€™t make me want to actively claw my eyes out, which is an improvement on a lot of this year. It could absolutely have been much worse ā€” but donā€™t you hate having to settle?


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Author
Image of Bob Chipman
Bob Chipman
Bob Chipman is a critic and author.