There is a lot that’s pleasantly scary in “The Polar Express.” The train ride is like an out-of-control roller coaster, in which the Polex takes impossible inclines, plummets from great heights, skids across a frozen lake, and glides across bridges. We go under the train, over it, through it. We follow the boy as he crosses its snow covered roof at high speeds. We follow a golden ticket caught in the wind as it falls to the snow, is kicked up by a pack of wolves, blown off a cliff, a caught by a bird and vomitted by a nestling, and ultimately sucked back into the Polex. When the children reach the North Pole, they of course get lost, on conveyor belts, in tunnels, on more roller coasters, and they find themselves crossing a terrifying chasm on foot, across a single railroad track.
Underneath a giant Christmas tree is a compass rose, with all points marked “S.” In a neat touch, the Christmas-year-round city at the North Pole is deserted. When we do meet the elves, they’re demonic little dudes in red, singing “Here Comes Santa Claus” about as cheerfully as Peter Lorre sang “Peer Gynt” in “M.” Spooky. I like the spookiness. It reminded me of how “The Nightmare Before Christmas”—a positive masterpiece compared to “Polex”—showed that there is something unnerving and voyeuristic about holidays in general.
Based on a dozen-page children’s book, “The Polar Express” has been significantly padded to reach feature length, and it feels that way. If the elves followed OSHA standards there’d be no movie. But this is what the movie is REALLY about: a virtuousic celebration of effects and visuals. “The Polar Express” isn’t about “the spirit of Christmas,” it’s about the train roaring over us at 100 miles an hour. If you’re wondering why I recommended “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” but am lukewarm about this one, it’s because both movies are technical exercises, but only “Sky Captain” has the courage to just be a technical exercise, without feeling obliged to cram in insincere crap about “believing.” A movie with imagery as good as “Polex’s” is entertaining for its own sake and need not be in service of anything that it doesn’t genuinely care about.
Speaking of spooky…“The Polar Express” has come under a lot of criticism because so many of its attempts to be cute and cuddly have backfired into being grimace-worthy. The motion capture characters have been described as “Frankenstein dolls not quite come to life” and the elfish celebration has been compared to a “Nuremberg rally.” I suspect director Robert Zemeckis and everyone else behind “Polex” wanted it to be a little chilling, but probably not as much as it is. But I don’t hold this against the movie because, you know, who cares. It looks cool. My only complaint is that the spookiness doesn’t fit with the mawkishness. In fact, I probably could have tolerated, maybe even enjoyed all the stuff about “believing”—it is a theologic discussion, of a general, shallow sort—if the movie hadn’t got all teary-eyed about it, as if everything’s been resolved and okay just because the end credits are about to roll. But that’s just me, and I don’t think mawkishness fits with anything.
I remember a Christmas cartoon I used to watch as a kid, and if anyone recognizes what I’m talking about please let me know. It was visually unsophisticated compared to “Polex” and followed a boy, on Christmas Eve, whose snowman came to life and took him flying to a giant festival of snowmen, where Santa Claus was the guest of honor. There was no dialogue and no sound, only music, and when the boy got home his snowman probably melted. The piece so perfectly captured that sense of wonder and loss that goes with childhood.
I suppose it’s too much to ask a big expensive production like “Polex” to be so esoteric. Because the movie is ultimately an IMAX film—it’s doing better at IMAX than it ever did in first-run theatres—it just has to talk down to us like we’re all three-year-olds. It could have been a dream, and it even achieves some moments of true otherworldiness. But then the spell is broken by three stupid musical numbers, bad jokes, and needless cutesy kiddie exposition. And that awful Josh Groban song over the credits. That guy sucks. I wish “The Polar Express” either actually had something to say, or, if it had nothing to say, had been content to play as a weird dream, and not arbitrarily plugged in a bunch of junk about “believing.”
Oh yeah, and Tom Hanks is in it, and he plays, like, everybody.
Finished Friday, February 18th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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