‘Polar Express’ looks beautiful but lacks heart

In theaters

THE POLAR EXPRESS, directed by Robert Zemeckis, written by Zemeckis and William Broyles Jr., based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg, 97 minutes, rated G.

The new holiday movie “The Polar Express” is so chilly and devoid of life, it should have been released on Halloween.

Director Robert Zemeckis has taken Chris Van Allsburg’s spare, 32-page children’s book, inflated it with plot elements and characters not in the original and launched it onto the masses with an avalanche of hype.

A reported $170 million was spent producing this beauty, but don’t be fooled by the inflated budget or by the colorful animation you see in the television ads. The movie’s story and characters are so flat, this sleeper car derails.

Using performance capture technology, the film uses real actors – Tom Hanks chief among them – to achieve photo-realism through computer animation.

That’s an inevitable progression of the CGI movement, but is photorealism really what audiences want from an animated movie? The recent successes of “Finding Nemo,” “Shrek 2” and “The Incredibles” suggest otherwise, but “Express” begs to differ.

What we have here is a movie whose computer chip renders beautiful interiors and landscapes but which fails to faithfully capture the human form. The children in this movie, in particular, don’t look like real tots struggling to believe in Santa. They look like waxen, undead extras from “Seed of Chucky,” their lifeless eyes so unnerving, they make the movie difficult to enjoy.

The film follows an 8-year-old boy (voiced by Hanks) whose belief in Santa is on the wane. On Christmas Eve, he falls into a deep, vivid dream that transports him to the North Pole by way of the Polar Express, a gleaming train that magically pulls in front of the boy’s house.

The Express is filled with other children needing their own beliefs recharged and it is manned by a conductor also played by Hanks. Their journey to the North Pole proves harrowing, ghostly and fraught with danger – it’s literally a roller-coaster ride into situations that nearly cost all their lives.

When they finally do meet Santa and his ugly gaggle of elves, what they find is an industrial underworld as bleak and as deadly efficient as the one in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” More bizarre and perverse is that when Santa at last makes his appearance in the movie, it’s in a scene that pointedly recalls Hitler’s Nuremberg appearance in “Triumph of the Will.” The elves go wild, a zeppelin flies overhead, and you have to wonder what the hell Zemeckis was smoking.

Individual scenes in “Express” are impressive and the movie does mirror the look of the book. But for the warm cup of holiday cheer most audience members rightfully expect from this G-rated movie, they should know that the film is akin to attending a wake as directed by Federico Fellini.

Grade: C-

On video and DVD

ELF, directed by Jon Favreau, written by David Berenbaum, 95 minutes, rated PG.

Jon Favreau’s far more traditional holiday movie, “Elf,” is the one to see this week. In it, Will Ferrell finds his best role to date as Buddy, a bumbling, 30-year-old man-child who, as an orphaned infant, crawled into Santa’s (Ed Asner) sack one Christmas Eve and was swept away to the North Pole.

There, in spite of his lumbering, decidedly nonelfin size, he was raised as an elf by Papa Elf (a perfectly cast Bob Newhart), who eventually encourages Buddy to return to New York City to reconnect with his real-life father, Walter (James Caan), a difficult man who has long been a mainstay on Santa’s naughty list.

Upon arriving in Manhattan, Buddy takes a day job as a department store elf – and the movie gets a lift, flirting with the sort of comedy David Sedaris captured in his biting, hilarious series of essays for National Public Radio, “The Santaland Diaries.”

Ultimately, the movie sidesteps Sedaris’ caustic brand of cynicism, but not before getting in a few clever jabs at the gross commercialization of the Christmas season.

Mary Steenburgen, Daniel Tay and Zooey Deschanel offer support as Buddy’s loving stepmom, lonely half-brother, and love interest, respectively, but they have nothing on Ferrell, who finds himself in a movie that fully realizes his gifts as a comedian. This is that rare fit between director, writer and star, with the sweet, wide-eyed Ferrell going a long way in securing his movie career.

Grade: B

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, 5:30 p.m. Thursdays on WLBZ 2 Bangor and WCSH 6 Portland, and are archived at RottenTomatoes.com. He may be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.