Originally posted 12/4/04
The Polar Express
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Writers: Robert Zemeckis and William Broyles, Jr., based on the book written and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg
Producers: Steve Starkey, Robert Zemeckis, Gary Goetzman, William Teitler
Featuring the physical and vocal talents of: Tom Hanks, Michael Jeter, Nona Gaye, Peter Scolari, Eddie Deezen, Daryl Sabara, Isabella Peregrina, Jimmy Bennett
Maybe it’s that the warm and inviting illustrative paintings of Chris Van Allsburg never should have moved, or talked. Or maybe it’s that the simple story, a wisp of a fable, was not the stuff to support a 100-minute movie. This problem also plagued Ron Howard’s bloated and horrifying adaptation of Dr. Suess’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Or maybe it’s that the “performance capture” technology used to put human movement and spirit inside animated figures is still so new that its power to entrance is not yet readily within grasp.
Whatever the reason, and it may be parts of all the above, this feature adaptation of holiday classic The Polar Express, while imaginative and frequently arresting, is too inconsistent to be honored in my memory with the same fondness I hold for the book. It is usually my philosophy that adaptations of books must be treated as movies first, and criticized on their own terms, but the filmmakers have labored so mightily to bring what we love about the book to life, it is difficult to ignore where it falls short.
If any filmmaker today could have shown themselves equal to the task, Robert Zemeckis would have. One of the best working in Hollywood’s big-budget mainstream, he has always managed to put groundbreaking technology at the service of his story, from the poetic light shows of Contact to the virtuoso computer-aided camerawork of the final third of What Lies Beneath, maybe the most riveting high-gloss treatment an old-fashioned ghost horrorshow ever got.
But here his grip is remarkably slippery, and you can tell by the wildly shifting moods. Simple wonderment is only to be found in fits and starts, more often we are careening from sinister weirdness to frantic whimsy to noisy roller-coaster action to strained sequences of artificial peril – are we really to believe our hero is going to simply fall to his death 30 minutes in?
The hero in question, who is decidedly not going to fall to his death, is an unnamed boy living in an average suburban household. It’s Christmas Eve and, though tucked into bed, he’s got one skeptical eye open towards his door. Since last year he has grown to suspect that, however those presents are getting under the tree, it’s certainly not by way of a magical elf dropping through the chimney.
But then, a great rumbling is heard outside his window, and suddenly out of the fog a great steam train roars down his street, and a kindly but stern Conductor is beckoning him aboard this thing he calls The Polar Express.
The Conductor looks and sounds like Tom Hanks, as do many of the other characters, including the boy’s father and a mysterious hobo hitchhiking atop the train. By wearing a motion capture suit, Hanks and other actors including Nona Gaye, Peter Scolari and the late Michael Jeter acted out the movements of their characters on a bare stage. Another series of captures was done for facial movement, then voices were recorded.
They do not always match so obviously as with the Conductor – in the case of our hero child, Hanks performs the body movement, Daryl Sabara of Spy Kids provides the voice, and a child actor named Josh Hutcherson provided additional movement and facial acting.
Hanks pulls so much duty that this is clearly as much a labor of love for him as for Zemeckis, but in this case I must unfortunately judge it a miscalculation. What we love about Hanks is that we recognize certain core qualities in him in every role, he is not the type of physical or vocal technician to be able to make a digitally-created character pop to distinctive life like Andy Serkis did with Smeagol/Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies. And so we see or hear something familiar and think “hey, it’s Tom again”, and suddenly we’re outside of the illusion.
The journey to the North Pole, where our hero will face his doubts and decide once and for all if he really believes in this Christmas thing, has many moments of charm. Much after the fashion of the Harry Potter stories, our boy now has some companions, a strong, confident girl and a boy with self-esteem issues, to be exact. The boy (body: Peter Scolari, voice: Jimmy Bennett, facial work: Hayden McFarland) in particular seems beaten down by the idea of Christmas. We sense from his slumped posture and look of quiet perpetual fear that there’s great pain in his life, and the movie is sensitive enough to give us only hints, as the details of his particular sorrow are not the point.
The point is that this is a journey of faith, embodied by the gift our hero chooses in the movie’s climax (the canvas truly opens up in this last third, and the sights are stunning to behold). The journey often has the feeling of a dream, where experiences fold in to one another with their own impenetrable logic, and half-complete symbols hint at an understanding which may or may not eventually come.
This is right, I think, the book always had a dreamlike quality that suggested it was all part of the boy’s own process of grappling with his beliefs. And I’ve always liked my childrens’ stories a little eerie and enigmatic, the North Pole here has some distinctly Willy Wonka-ish touches. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about technical details in this review, and that this movie’s look is so unique to the eyes is important; but I think it also is the key to its ultimate undoing. We are so forcefully wowed by the color and motion that the journey loses some fundamental sense of mystery or even choice. By the time our hero decides he believes in Christmas, we’re wondering, having seen all the eye-popping sights he has already seen, what took him so long.