**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Tom Hanks, Michael Jeter, Leslie Harter Zemeckis, Eddie Deezen, and Nona Gaye
Directed by Robert Zemeckis & written for the screen by Zemeckis and William Broyles, Jr., from the book by Chris Van Allsburg
2004
99 min G
The historical Saint Nicholas was a third or fourth century bishop in one of those Eastern European nations that is plagued with vampires and doesn’t use vowels. Depending on the story, he either gained his Yuletide fame by giving Christmas presents to poor children or by buying three desperate girls out of a life of prostitution. Because he did this in secret, by throwing sacks of money through the window of the father of the three girls, he became the unofficial patron saint of thieves. As a priest, his sacramental role was to stand in for Jesus during the celebration of the eucharist, a nice reminder that we find the eternal not just in silence and study but through each other. I’m sure if he were alive today, he would be mightily confused about how his name and image are being put to popular use.
So I’m having all kinds of issues with “The Polar Express” because who is this Santa Claus it is presenting? At his most benign, he is a conversational convenience (“maybe Santa will get you that new circular saw this year, honey…”) in much the same way that a churchgoing monotheist can say complain that he’s “angered the gods” or even use the adjective “Bacchanale.” But Santa is the scourge of the religious in that he has come to represent the secularization and commercialization of Christmas (a natural step, considering Christmas is itself the Christianization of pre-existing pagan winter feasts). He is also the scourge of secular humanists because he represents all that is corrupt and hypocritical about religion, in which the spirits of selflessness and generosity have been replaced by greed and consumerism.
What is the “spirit of Christmas” that everyone in keeps talking about in “The Polar Express,” a movie that does not feature one crucifix, nativity, or utterance of the J-name? (There is the mention of an “angel” because angels are sufficiently divorced from religion.) In a movie that constantly begs children and grown-ups to “believe”—that douses those conversations in schmaltzy music by Josh Groban and climaxes with the little boy’s transition from unbelief to belief—in what, exactly, are we supposed to believe? Is Santa a stand-in for God? Jesus? Buddha? The need to trust that there is a power greater than rationality, in much the same way that “2001” argues that a perfectly reasonable existence is an evolutionary dead-end?
Why are movie parents so upset when their kids stop believing in Santa? And if Santa is a stand-in for God, why aren’t they MORE upset? Why isn’t there a grand gothic cathedral at the North Pole? Certainly by the time you’re sainted you’re beyond excommunication. Do parents who no longer believe in God still want their children to have faith, and is that what’s behind this whole Santa mess? At one point, the hero of “The Polar Express” confronts a train-hopping hobo and they have quite the existential conversation about all this being a dream, about Santa being a hoax, about “seeing is believing,” and about not wanting to be “bamboozled.”
“The Polar Express” has every right to be an attack on atheism or skepticism. I try not to begrudge a movie for believing whatever it wants to believe, as long as it’s sincere, or at least successfully fakes sincerity. Even if it’s the sickening racism of “Birth of a Nation” or the crypto-fascism of “The Incredibles,” I try to congratulate movies that have the guts to stand up for something, even if it’s antithetical to my own morals. Jesus, Buddha, atheism, multiple JFK assassins, alien abduction, whatever. I guess what bothers me about “The Polar Express” is the same thing that bothers me about every movie that digs deep into Santa Claus: he means anything to anybody, even completely opposite things, and so he ultimately means nothing.
He’s a subtextual black hole, a thematic fill-in-the-blank, an evasive “it means whatever you want.” So at the center (an unnecessary center, I might add) of the movie’s meaning, amidst mawkishness and mushy music and wide eyes and the general cinematic diction of “what we’ve learned today,” is a swirling cloud of vagueness. When Josh Groban implores you to “believe” over and over again, he may be refering to something specific, but in the context of the movie, I guess it just means take whatever vague, non-specific Judeo-Christian Western warm feelings of goodness you already have. Do those harder, the movie implores. Although not too hard, I suppose, because then you’ll question the consumerism of Santa and not spend as much around Christmas. Santa Claus is the cowards way out; he’s what you put in when your movie doesn’t say anything but you want to create the illusion that it does. And as we all know, cowards bend the knee.
Now you understand why I like Easter better than Christmas. I think my head’s going to explode about now. All that aside, I liked “The Polar Express” more than I thought I would.
On Christmas Eve, a boy has a dream, a fantasy, a vision, or whatever, in which a fantastic train—the Polar Express, or “Polex”—takes him and about a dozen other children to the North Pole. Along the way he sees amazing sights, makes friends, and has a couple of close calls. And yes, the motion capture animation used to turn real actors into the animated figures we see on screen is a little bit creepy, at times stiff and lifeless, but that’s okay. Creepy is good. Maybe your kids will hate it but I didn’t mind.
Page two of "The Polar Express." Back to home.