How the Grinch Stole Christmas

The Green Screen of Our Greed

I don't think anyone truly needed a live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. The 1966 Chuck Jones special had already boiled Dr. latestnetflix.com's take is that Seuss's holiday fable down to its sharpest, cleanest form in twenty-six perfect minutes.

But in 2000, Ron Howard took that slim story and inflated it into a big studio oddity: part Christmas spectacle, part critique of consumerism, part origin story for a green misanthrope with unresolved childhood trauma. The movie is gaudy and overcaffeinated and, honestly, too strange to dismiss.

Howard's Whoville doesn't feel warm so much as suffocating. The whole place looks like a retail display that has been left under fluorescent lights too long. The colors are sickly and dulled, and the town has the cramped, airless energy of a shopping mall in its final hour before closing.

(Maybe that is the joke. Maybe Howard understood the only way to get us on the Grinch's side was to make the town he robs almost unbearably irritating.) These Whos are status-hungry consumers who seem to measure affection in decorations and stuff. Seen that way, the Grinch stops looking like a monster and starts looking like the only resident with a functioning survival instinct.

In the middle of all this chaos is Jim Carrey, almost disappearing inside Rick Baker’s punishing prosthetic design. The makeup process was so miserable that Carrey famously consulted a CIA torture-resistance expert just to cope with it, and you can feel the physical strain in the performance. He doesn't simply inhabit the Grinch.