Spirited (2022)

Score: 4.5 / 5

I wasn't ready for this one. Attempts at new holiday classics are tiring if nothing else, especially new adaptations of Dickens's most famous work. And frankly, if you know me at all you know I just don't like Will Ferrell or his comedy. So to have all the above in one, and to make it a direct-to-streaming feature on Apple TV, was not a recipe for piquing my interest. But as fate would have it, and as winter break was settling in, Spirited materialized on our screen at home and took us by storm.

Wholly original because it riffs on so many other Christmas classics, this film takes its inspiration from the idea that an entire industry exists among spirits to save a new soul every Christmas. Think Monsters, Inc. meets The Santa Clause. Basically, every year, Jacob Marley (Patrick Page of Hadestown on Broadway) and his team of spirits researches, locates, and identifies one jerk or miser to be un-Scrooged, so to speak. They think they've found the guy -- a hotel manager -- until the Ghost of Christmas Present (Will Ferrell) comes across the guest speaker at the hotel. It's Clint Briggs (Ryan Reynolds), a social media manipulator who consults other companies on branding in an aggressive manner. He's amoral to the point that he even counsels his niece Wren to engage in some bullying online to win a school election. His assistant Kimberly (Octavia Spencer) doesn't approve of his antics, but it's a good job and there's always the hope she can help for good, right? It's interesting that the film chooses him because it's almost like the writers are more interested in the banality of evil, or perhaps reframing that in a 21st Century context; Clint isn't wholly unlikable, he's just meta-aware of his place in a dog-eat-dog world.

All this happens a few songs in, so you can start to get the idea of the pacing here. It's a lengthy movie, chock-full of music and big numbers. Oh, did I mention this is a musical? With the genius of Pasek and Paul behind the songs, it's the kind of sudden hit that made The Greatest Showman a lasting classic. Energetic and peppy, it also hits those upbeat but heavy emotional ballads that soar directly from the screen and into your heart. Of course, the best in that vein is given firmly to Spencer in "The View from Here," but really everyone gets their chance to shine. Which is saying a lot for musically bereft performers like Ferrell.

Then again -- and this is what took me by complete surprise -- Ferrell is very much the heart of this movie, and the plot largely turns on his own "conversion" experience of sorts. As he spends so much time in the world of the living, he starts wishing to become human again, and it's just damned cute. Thankfully, he delivers a much more grounded and reserved character than usual, which may not sound like much, but it's actually nice to see from him. He and Reynolds, who delivers pretty much exactly what we expect, make a pretty good team, and their repartee and burgeoning buddy-ship is as annoying as it is heartwarming. They shine in a rousing number, "Good Afternoon," which will surely become a signature favorite; the song title is the Dickensian phrase, they tell us, for "F--- off." And you will absolutely cackle at its audacity and good-natured irreverence. 

All this against a fabulously colorful (if not always inventive) and kinetic backdrop of capital-B Broadway style flair. Each performer seems to approach the production with an almost vaudevillian enthusiasm, which especially helps in the enormous chorus numbers. The production design occasionally feels like old-school filmed musicals with bare sets and an over-emphasis on dramatic lighting, but I don't hate that; it does feel a bit lackluster at times, and the apparently reliance on green-screen backgrounds is disappointing, but the excellent choreography and stirring music help tide us over. By about two-thirds of the way through I personally began to feel some exhaustion, and I'm still not sure this movie needed to be over two hours long. But the whole thing just feels so good, it's hard to take a miserly attitude toward it.