We are being told these days that the wave of the future in moviemaking is the seamless merger of live action and animation. We’ve been seeing it in bits and pieces for a decade-the character of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films was the actor Andy Serkis turned into an animated figure. The key element of it is a process known as “performance capture,” in which actors like Serkis are essentially converted into special effects. They are filmed on a bare soundstage with hundreds of computerized electrodes all over their body, after which their forms are digitized so they can be moved about in a computer-generated universe built around them in three dimensions. The medium’s most visionary and successful directors have committed themselves to the perfection of the entire process. James Cameron, the director of Titanic, has just spent somewhere in the realm of $500 million on his science-fiction epic Avatar, which aims to be for performance capture what Star Wars was for science fiction. Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson (the maker of the Lord of the Rings trilogy) are collaborating on a trio of movies based on the Tintin character. But the director who has made performance capture his life’s work is Robert Zemeckis, who made Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Forrest Gump. He is now on his third all-captured film in five years, following The Polar Express and Beowulf. It’s a rendition of A Christmas Carol, with Jim Carrey playing Scrooge and all three ghosts.
To hear Zemeckis tell it, this new system of moviemaking is a director’s dream; it removes all the rough edges from the medium, all its uncertainties and imperfections. Every element of a movie can be considered in isolation and perfected independently. When the actor is being filmed, the only thing that matters is his performance, since no one has to worry about lighting or sound or the weather or anything else. The atmosphere can be layered in later through the visual design. Editing becomes almost entirely unnecessary; everything can move fluidly from one moment to the next without cutting and slicing.
“The ability to move the camera anywhere, to take any angle on a scene without worrying about the physical thing getting in the way-how wonderful is that?” Zemeckis told Dave Kehr of the New York Times. “I like to say that the beautiful thing about what I’m doing here in this form is that it frees me from the tyranny of technique, and yet I get the wonderful bonus of maintaining the magic of the performance. I get the best of both worlds.”
He may, but we don’t. The director’s joy at his liberation from the difficulties of moviemaking is palpable, but the movies he has made using this technique are profoundly joyless, and the joylessness is a direct result of the technique with which he has fallen in love.
The new Christmas Carol is a case in point. There is every reason it should be wonderful. It is faithful to the source, which is wise, since the Dickens novella is so transporting that it can be read over and over again, and versions of it seen over and over again, without the story losing a millionth part of its ineffable charm and power. And in voice at least, Jim Carrey is a splendid Scrooge, austere and bitter before becoming merry and childlike in his salvation.
But the Zemeckis Christmas Carol isn’t wonderful. It’s just weird. The reanimation of human tissue is what Dr. Frankenstein did, and look what happened to him. After three passes at performance capture, Zemeckis hasn’t defeated the central problem of the form. If a director places one of these performance-capture creatures in a realistic setting, as Peter Jackson did with Andy Serkis’s Gollum, he can work wonders.
But the effect of an animated human body overlaid by computer illustration is ineffably discomfiting. It’s like seeing your little kid with ugly face paint on her beautiful visage: You want to go up to the screen with Windex and wipe the goop off Scrooge’s face so you can see Jim Carrey behind it. As for the animated world around Carrey, it’s far less magical than director Carol Reed’s stunning re-creation of Dickens’s London in Oliver! 41 years ago, in which actual actors danced through an amazingly detailed marketplace.
Doubtless performance capture will improve, and doubtless the merger of imaginary worlds and human figures doing impossible stuff will dazzle in a way it hasn’t yet. (It’s hard to believe James Cameron, who is a wizard, won’t have figured some of that out with Avatar.) But the extreme artificiality of the form creates distance between the viewer and the work. The secret about the movies is the way they trick you into believing you are seeing something realistic when you are actually watching something entirely artificial. The key is the recognizable human face and the interaction of the human body with recognizable real-world objects. Remove those from the picture and you are in the entirely stylized realm of kabuki theater.
I am not Zemeckis or Spielberg or Cameron or Jackson, all of whom have earned in the billions of dollars and each of whom has won Academy Awards. I’m just a man in a movie theater watching their work, and for the life of me, I can’t imagine what has possessed them to go off on this peculiar tangent. Maybe it’s just that they can’t take it anymore when they have a shot set up and it starts to rain. Who can blame them for their impatience, and for achieving God-like control over all aspects of their productions? Alas, now they are as gods, but their work is as blech.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
