Spirited (2022)

PG-13, but it feels dirtier than it is.  Honestly, if my kids wanted to watch it, I could probably watch it with them and be fine.  There's some really mild language throughout.  The most uncomfortable stuff has to do with death and a potential suicide.  It's more thematic than it is anything outright offensive.  There's a joke about a one-night stand that becomes a bit of a running gag.  

DIRECTOR: Sean Anders

I was going to write this yesterday. I  really wanted to.  Okay, by "really wanted to", it was my plan.  But the Internet was crap, so I let this one get mothballed to today.  But it also was one of the things that caused me to give up exercise.  It's funny how thought processes work.  But I do want to write about Spirited.  I'm a sucker for "A Christmas Carol."  I talk about it with my students every year.  I use it as an example of a perfectly formulated story.  If you had to distill what makes me emotional at Christmas, it's the themes of "A Christmas Carol."  I'm going to be honest, I didn't get the feels with Spirited.  Perhaps it is because it didn't allow itself to get as vulnerable as other movies, but I still think that the movie is brilliant.

I think "A Christmas Carol" is one of the most adapted stories ever done, maybe second to Sherlock Holmes. I read that somewhere.  Google it. Prove me wrong.  But with so many adaptations of "A Christmas Carol", it's smart to do something else with it. Scrooged has been and probably always will be my favorite Christmas movie because it blends the old with enough of the new to create something really genius.  Spirited is an even bigger departure from the original work, so I almost want to treat it as its own thing. This sounds insulting, but it almost feels like fan fiction or expanded universe.  I say it isn't an insult because the very nature of its existence is something that is done for fans of the original story. For the most part, "A Christmas Carol" is a litmus test for cultural literacy.  Like I stated, I use "A Christmas Carol" a lot in my class and every so often, someone doesn't know what I'm talking about.  I'm not judging them.  But Spirited not only requires you to know "A Christmas Carol", it requires you to analyze the heck out of it.

The funny thing is, I'm not sure if the movie is smart or dumb about it.  At the end of the day, it is a Will Ferrell / Ryan Reynolds movie. I'm not saying that those guys are exclusively starring in dumb things.  I'm saying that there is almost a subgenre involving these guys.  And I will say that Spirited falls into this category.  It has the vibe of The Other Guys.  These are the movies that we have wildly broad archetypes, but there's something to say in the movie.  With Spirited, I'm almost picking apart what the movie is actually trying to say.  Part of me is intrigued by the almost moral good that Clint believes in.  (Trust me, I will rip into Clint in a minute.)  I like how broadly un-Scrooge that Clint is.  They are still the same archetype.  They are fundamentally selfish.  They leave a wake of destruction behind them because of their own selfish needs.  But Clint isn't necessarily hateful like Scrooge.  (Note: I dig that Ferrell is a reformed Scrooge as a ghost.  It helps the story a lot.  Also, my wife called it in Moment One.) 

Clint, when he talks about people not changing, isn't denial completely for his own sake.  He's not trying to convince himself that people don't change.  His stubbornness is almost a ministry to Present / Scrooge (from hereon, I will be referring to exclusively as Scrooge because why not?).  Clint sees himself as put together.  He sees the world as a broken place comprised of broken people who will continue to destroy humanity, based on his impact or not.  Scrooge doesn't see him that way, and uses the metaphor of ripples to describe how much influence that Clint has over humanity.  But Clint's major motivation is pity. As much as Scrooge is ministering to Clint to be a force for good to humanity, Clint isn't doing a completely opposite battle.  It's not like Clint wants Scrooge to be a bad person.  But he does want to let Scrooge know that he can't fix certain people.  After all, there is something therapeutic about letting people go.  

And that's where I'm at.  To a certain extent, they are both right.  It is our role to step in and fight evil when we see it.  But sometimes, coming at people full force is mentally scarring for us.  The genius part of Spirited is that it doesn't make Clint Scrooge.  "The Christmas Carol" Scrooge is a caricature.  It is so easy to hate Scrooge because he's borderline unrealistic in his grumpiness.  Okay, I know people like Scrooge really exist.  But Dickens uses Scrooge to represent a notion rather than a person. Clint I find to be way more evil than Dickens's Scrooge. Clint is a real dude.  He's genuinely why things are so terrible right now. His entire business, for as charming as he is, is to spread disinformation and spark discord between people for private gain.  And that is a force of nature.  For all of Scrooge's talk about ripples, Clint may be too big.  He might be a societal problem.  There's a fun irony there. Dickens wrote Scrooge to be representative of personality, yet it is believable that he can be changed.  Clint is written to be painfully human, yet it is almost unbelievable that he could change because humans might be more damaging to society than general grumpiness.  It's interesting.

Can we talk about my favorite moment?  It's extremely superficial, the more I think about it, but I love it so darned much.  I love that the movie is very cool with not giving us the happiest ending. Clint dies.  He straight up dies.  No takebacks (kind of).  His big moment is that he sacrifices his life for another person, which shows that he can think of someone beyond himself.  Now, time stops right before that moment and we get this sweet and touching dance number proving that Clint is capable of wonderful things.  But then time starts again?  The bus hits Clint and there's a line that makes it all worth it: "Sacrifice needs consequences".  I'm paraphrasing because I'm not going to cue up the movie to find the exact line. Yeah, it wouldn't be a sacrifice if there was a get-out-of-jail-free card.  Having Clint get out of that would have diminished what he did for Scrooge.  I know, we probably wouldn't have noticed if Clint got a free pass, but man that hit me hard.  I know.  Superficial, but I really dug that the movie had the guts to do it.  Sure, he comes back as the new Ghost of Christmas Present.  But I don't even care.  Christmas needs to have dark storytelling from time to time.  It's why I hate Hallmark Christmas movies so much.

Yeah, I should probably write more.  I had stuff to talk about, but then got distracted.  Can we give so many kudos to Octavia Spencer?  Man, her scenes.  I get that this is a goofy musical comedy.  And everyone does a good job with the music.  But Octavia Spencer's songs in this just imbue the film with a sense of legitimacy.  There's something a little silly with everyone else's songs in the movie, but Kimberly's songs are vulnerable as heck.  I'm assuming that she's singing, but her songs are amazingly done.  And tying them to the key themes of the story --drawing a line? --so good.  She might be my favorite part of the movie and she rarely has a joke.  No, everything about her character works.  I had no idea that she would have such good chemistry with Will Ferrell.  But her stuff is the best meet-cutey stuff that I've seen in a Christmas movie in a long time.

I don't know. The movie is good.  Is it amazing?  This was going to be flimsy wrap up paragraph, but I feel like I have to answer this.  It's really funny, really cute, and has some great ideas coupled with decent singing and dancing.  But is there something muddy about it too?  Yeah, I can't deny that there's a bit of a mess lying in here.  It's almost trying to do too much, which I don't really fault it for.  Without the complexity, this movie wouldn't be at all memorable.  But it also is messy and I can't ignore that.  So is it amazing?  Probably not.  But I also applaud that it aims for something higher, even if it kind of misses.