There's plenty of room to do a serious overhaul on the narrative formula of A Christmas Carol, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. As what surely must be the work of English-language fiction to have been adapted into the greatest number of different films, plays, television episodes, and I imagine other tales in other media, A Christmas Carol is a perfect candidate for some radical revisionism: on the one hand, it's desperately in need of a fresh approach, and on the other hand, it's surely impossible to actually damage it. You can't come up with some cockamamie nutsoid version of A Christmas Carol so off-base as to endanger the dignity of the story; it is part of the fabric of humanity. It was a timeless classic before our grandparents were born, and it will remain a timeless classic after our grandchildren have been buried in the cold dirt.

So my objection to Spirited is not that it's a lousy version of A Christmas Carol. It is by no means the lousiest. Its attempt to perform the aforementioned act of radical revisionism is at least conceptually sound, and not altogether so very radical as all that. Basically, Spirited is the story told from the perspective of one of the ghosts - the Ghost of Christmas Present (Will Ferrell), specifically. Which I can't imagine is approach that nobody has attempted in the intervening 179 years, though I can't name an example off the top of my head.* Taking this modest twist, it then goes even further by suggesting that the business of Christmas hauntings is indeed just, that, a business: Jacob Marley (Patrick Page) is in fact the CEO of a sort of afterlife corporation where every year, he and his crack team of ghosts select a living human asshole whose redemption to The True Spirit Of Christmas will have some ripple effect, making the whole world at least a moderately better place. They've been doing this for a great many years, it would seem: Ebenezer Scrooge back in the 1840s doesn't even seem to have been their first target, though by virtue of having inspired Charles Dickens, he's the one everybody knows about.

Which is the point where the concept really starts to devour itself:  I don't think you can really have "a whole corporate team of ghosts perform A Christmas Carol every single year on one particular person" in a universe where A Christmas Carol exists as a book that everybody in the anglosphere knows the plot of. And Spirited does a pretty clean job of demonstrating precisely why that is, because the particular neo-Scrooge that they select, based on Christmas Present's rather loud and obnoxious recommendation, is one of those people who knows the story, and he immediately starts throwing out defenses and deflections and pretty effortlessly ruins the ghosts' careful scheme to make him see the light. And it's just, like, he can't be the first one to do that, but the plot of Spirited very much hinges on nobody in the afterlife having the first clue what to do if they can't follow the exact beat-for-beat script of A Christmas Carol.

The Scrooge in question is Clint Briggs, a political and corporate consultant played by Ryan Reynolds, and that gets us to the real reason that he's so immediately intransigent and cynical. For all its Christmas Carol trappings, Spirited is ultimately pitched very much at the level of "a Ryan Reynolds comedy, with very special guest star Will Ferrell" (the two stars get that diagonally-skewed "they both have first billing!" type of credit that gets used when it's hard to say who is the bigger draw), so the main function of the script - by Sean Anders & John Morris, the former of whom also directs, though this all has the obvious aura of something that coalesced out of the willpower of a committee - is to present a conflict that allows each man to bring his trademark screen persona to bear on the other. For Reynolds, that means silver-tongued upbeat asshole sarcasm, for Ferrell that means a lot of belligerent, petulant shouting, and I will give the filmmakers credit: their scenario does in fact suit those two modes very well, if either of those modes are what you're looking for. It's by no means an elegant machine, at a horrifically bloated 127 minutes, and it suffers immensely from clotting things up with a romantic subplot wherein Christmas Present falls in love with Clint's second-in-command, the morally conflicted Kimberly (Octavia Spencer); other than the basic satisfaction of having an actually great actor swoop in to provide some weight that neither Reynolds nor Ferrell can (and Spencer is putting some real effort into this), it doesn't really add much besides more complexity than this needs. I will say, as far as romantic subplots go, that I was surprised when Spirited found room to visit Clint's ex, now happily married with children; that's a scene from the book that basically never crops up in film adaptations.

Much of the bloat comes because Spirited is, on top of all the other things, an original musical; and this is of course not remotely new territory for Christmas Carol adaptations, though I suppose it's possible and even likely that Spirited is the first time that a musicalised version of the script has indulged in such tedious post-modern irony. Not quite in every musical number, but I think in more than half of them, there is some point where some character gives an exaggerated eye roll or does the whole "No! No! Stop the music!" thing, and we get the gag where the characters A) are aware that they're in a musical, and B) think that musicals are stupid, gimmicky, saccharine bullshit. In the all the annals of "indulging in genre tropes while pointing out how dumb those tropes are", a form of meta-humor that I enjoy approximately zero percent of the time, I think that musicals about how musicals are shitty is maybe the very lowest of the low; part of the point of musicals, after all, is that the songs come when the emotions become too potent to express them any other way. They are, almost by their nature, extra-sincere, and you can't do that while also making fun of sincerity.

Spirited has an even tougher time with this, since its roster of songs have been written by Benj Pasek & Justin Paul, who are quickly heading towards Tim Rice levels of both ubiquity, and how much they annoy the shit out of me (this is their second new movie musical in 2022, after Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile). Part of the Pasek & Paul experience is the just, so extreme version of theater kid energy, a boundless energy and fearlessness about coming across as corny or unsophisticated. They're some of the most nakedly emotive and over-sincere songwriters active in the medium, so for them to be yoked to a film that makes this many cynical jokes about itself just feels incredibly disorienting. It puts Spirited in a simply terrible spot, where it is simultaneously the most caustic and sarcastic thing, while also being the most pie-eyed and earnest and up-with-Christmas thing. The former mode almost always works better, largely on the grounds that Reynolds is somewhat imposing his will over the rest of the movie, and he is firmly in "smug jackhole" mode, but it's all very messy and inconsistent. Not to mention that, of the entire leading cast, Patrick Page is the only person who can sing even a little bit; the songs aren't tough, but they're still at the absolute outer edge of what Ferrell or Spencer can manage without completely mangling their voices (Reynolds is substantially better than either of them, without quite rounding the corner to "good"), and this especially hurts Spencer, who isn't getting comic numbers. None of the music is particularly exciting, but I will credit the songwriters for having done something outside of their extremely small and well-defined wheelhouse, with the song "Good Afternoon", which takes a shallow idea - the phrase "Good afternoon" as the Victorian era equivalent of "up your ass" - and keeps on pounding away at it until it's only a bloody smear on the rocks. But the sheer "this isn't working and we're going to keep making it bigger until it does" quality to it is kind of sweet in a horrible way.

The whole thing is all fairly grim, but to end on an upbeat note - since what else are we to do with a Christmas movie? - Anders's directing has a certain zippy, "hey, this is fun, we're puttin' on a show" charm in its ramshackle stiffness. He's doing very little to make the numbers pop, though Pasek & Paul have already made them so bouncy that it's probably for the best that the visuals reign them back in a bit. But he is letting the crew go a little overboard in the tacky Christmassy elements, and this is, I think, largely to the film's benefit. There's a slightly chintzy, "these are the costumes that the community theater has been using since the '80s to stage A Christmas Carol" energy to it all, and while I wouldn't necessarily say that's admirable, it at least fits with a Christmas movie more than most places. And a Christmas movie with these songs especially. The film is a rattled, inconsistent affair, but ultimately cutesy earnestness wins out, and that sort of excuses its overall clunkiness.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.

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*I am thinking here specifically of versions where the ghosts-as-ghosts are the protagonists. If we mean versions told from the perspective of people pretending to be ghosts and deliberately trying to "pull a Christmas Carol" on some other character, I'm 100% sure that approach has been taken; the most prominent recent example being the 2010 Doctor Who Christmas special - titled, wouldn't you just know it, "A Christmas Carol".