In the Flesh: The Muppet Christmas Carol

How do you write with any kind of objectivity about a film that shaped your childhood so profoundly? A Muppet Christmas Carol is the season entire, to me, a heartfelt plea for everyone to better themselves, to believe, yes, but also to act, to give, and in giving, learn to receive love. I know each of Paul Williams’ songs by heart. I hold hundreds of Brian Henson and John Fenner’s loving shots and beautifully ramshackle sets in my mind’s eye, etched there like Doré woodcuts. Am I capable of stepping back from something so deeply ingrained in my childhood that when I think of Charles Dickens, I picture Gonzo the Muppet (Dave Goelz)? I could, I suppose, point out that the penguin ice skating party is weaker than the movie’s other gags, or nitpick the speed with which Scrooge (Michael Caine) begins to change as a person, but the film is so lovingly crafted, Caine’s performance so committed, and each of the spirits so powerfully conceived of and realized that there’s little joy in such picayune critiques.

Think of Scrooge’s genuine pain as he watches his kind-hearted nephew, Fred (Steven Mackintosh), crack a joke at his expense, or his broken-hearted horror at the sight of Bob Cratchitt’s (Kermit the Frog, voiced by Steve Whitmire) family gutted by the death of Tiny Tim (Jerry Nelson). These moments aren’t powerful because they’re perfect, but because they’re earnest, because Dickens, and Henson in turn, are genuinely interested in the spirit of Christmas, not in an evangelistic sense, but out of a desire to see pure love and generosity transform the world. Is there anything more childlike? It makes me think of my father, whose unpredictable rages defined the first eighteen years of my life before his decision to go to therapy transformed our family and slowly, over the course of years, repaired our badly damaged relationship. People do change. The wish for a sudden change of heart may be a child’s fantasy, but it’s a fantasy that sometimes comes true. 

Perhaps objectivity, at the best of times a faintly ridiculous notion in art criticism, is of no real importance in assessing art that speaks to us from such a vulnerable place. Perhaps the only real answer is to open ourselves up and speak to others about what that art has given us, and how it makes us feel, to try to give them the gift of opening one’s self to grace and love through the medium of cinema. Art can’t heal the world alone, can’t change a heart in the course of a night, but it can tip the scales. It can open the door for thought and action. Brian Henson made A Muppet Christmas Carol in the wake of his own father’s death, the first Muppet movie without their legendary creator at the helm. There’s something beautiful about that, a child desperate for the miracle the movie shows us, for her father to change his heart, finding comfort in the art of a grown man who no doubt thought of his own as he watched Scrooge pulled backwards through time, becoming reacquainted with his own happiness and loss, seeing the people he’s lost and the ones he might gain by opening his heart. Maybe that’s all I need to share with you as a reviewer, on this cold winter’s night when our thoughts turn to our loved ones, to our hopes and dreams. A movie can be a prayer.