Andy Bockelman: Not too early for ‘Christmas Carol’

The Christmas season starts earlier and earlier every year, usually eclipsing Thanksgiving. One thing you can give thanks for is that the 2009’s interpretation of “A Christmas Carol” didn’t come out before Halloween.

Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey) is the scourge of Victorian era London — virtually everybody who knows the cold-hearted moneylender hates him, and the feeling is mutual, tenfold. The lone exceptions are his kindly clerk Bob Cratchit (Gary Oldman) and Scrooge’s merry nephew Fred (Colin Firth), but the old man hasn’t the time for affection, not even on Christmas Eve.

But this Christmas Eve is different, as Scrooge encounters his old business partner, Jacob Marley (Oldman), who has been deceased for seven years. Beset by an afterlife of woe and despair for his earthly misdeeds, the ghost of Marley warns Scrooge of the error of his ways and foretells of three more specters who will be visiting him.

And despite Scrooge’s protests, the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come (Carrey) will show him the true reason for the season.

Carrey’s rubberized facial characteristics add much to Scrooge’s craggy visage, and his spindly, flailing body language suggests the inner essence of the character, that of a good-spirited boy trapped within the shell of the “squeezing, wrenching, gasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” that Charles Dickens originally created.

Carrey’s talents also are put to good to use as the trio of ghosts, whether it’s the ethereal whisper of Christmas Past, the Liverpudlian boom of Christmas Present or the gravely silent movements of Christmas Yet to Come.

The story may be centered around Scrooge, but the rest of the cast is not wasted, with Oldman providing a fittingly pitiable characterization to Marley, Cratchit and the bodily motions of Tiny Tim, voiced by Ryan Ochoa. Also filling out the cast finely are Robin Wright Penn, Cary Elwes, Fionnula Flanagan, Bob Hoskins and Daryl Sabara.

With so many actors portraying so many different characters among them, the movie almost feels like one of the many stage productions of the Dickens classic. The oft-filmed story gets a high tech boost by greatly utilizing time and space, mostly thanks to the magic of writer/director Robert Zemeckis’s motion capture animation, used for his previous films “Beowulf” and “The Polar Express.”

Zemeckis focuses more on the ghost story element than anything, opening just as Dickens’ book does, with the ominous sentence, “Marley was dead.” This rendering includes the darker moments of the story, which have been trimmed or completely left out in other versions, staying true to the author’s original intent of plumbing the depths of mankind’s inherent nastiness and promoting the goodwill of the Christmas season as a solution to this ordeal.

The November release of “A Christmas Carol” may seem like a preemptive strike by Disney to get viewers in the mood for a month’s worth of Christmas shopping, and that’s certainly an inevitable outcome. But a less cynical way of looking at it is to see it as an opportunity is to practice the niceties of the holidays before and after Dec. 25, whenever you have the chance.

In other words: Don’t be a Scrooge.

Now playing at the West Theater.