Generally, Christmas movies cater to the PG crowd, or the hard R crowd. But what about the cynical smartass teenagers? Despite their hard callous exteriors, even they can appreciate something that’s on their wavelength. So for them comes Spirited, taking the snarkiest movie star (Ryan Reynolds) and pairing him with our most flexible comedian (Will Ferrell), to make a Christmas movie one step removed from sentimentality.
The hook for Spirited is a good one. The movie imagines that “A Christmas Carol” didn’t just happen to Ebenezer Scrooge, but it is a cottage industry run by the spirits of the afterlife, changing hundreds of rotten living lives for the better. After Jacob Marley (Patrick Page) and the Ghost of Christmas Past (Sunita Mani) and Future (Tracy Morgan) celebrate another successful year, the Ghost of Christmas Present (Will Ferrell) is having a crisis of faith: he doesn’t believe they’re doing enough to affect real change. Desperate for a big swing, Present decides next year’s choice to be haunted is Clint Briggs (Ryan Reynolds), a PR spin savant who many, including his 2nd in command Kimberly (Octavia Spencer), have listed as “unredeemable.”
Other than Octavia Spencer’s Kimberly, it’s truly amazing how little sincerity there is in most of what should be a Christmas movie. Normally that’s a death knell for a film, but specifically the overly saccharine Christmas movie genre could use a little of Spirited’s jaded worldview. The movie is constantly calling out characters and their motivations, sometimes cynically questioning why someone would be doing something. That gives Spirited a meaner edge that’s usually absent from Christmas fare, leading to really fun ironic musical numbers like “Good Afternoon.” Sometimes the movie gets too mean that it borders on distasteful, but the hits exceed the misses, and off-kilter a PG audience enough to hide the movie’s gooey interior.
The success of Spirited relies on the promise of a great comedic pairing in Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell. I think the casting is right here too: at this point, Reynolds can only be sincere if it’s extracted out of him by a superior actor. As such, he’s a perfect fit for the jaded, too smart for his own good Clint Briggs, smarming his way through life as cynically as possible. That means most of the emotional heft is put on Will Ferrell’s shoulders. Though not his best feature, Ferrell acquits himself reasonably well to a “spirit in an identity crisis,” clearly projecting his fears onto Reynolds’s Briggs. The comedic chemistry works best when Reynolds is calling out Ferrell and Ferrell either lashes out or has a breakthrough, with Reynolds eyerolling all the way, but just a bit curious to see where this goes. This paves a nice road for their prickly friendship, which slowly eats through Reynolds’s hard exterior just enough to land a soft sweet ending in time for Christmas. And when the movie needs Will to be vulnerable, Ferrell does just enough to make us not fall down the nihilist rabbit hole Reynolds’s character flirts him with constantly. Octavia Spencer certainly helps as Ferrell’s kindred human, as well as a great plot twist halfway through that certainly caught me offguard.
Get in, mock, get out. That appears to be Spirited’s mantra, capturing the hearts of teenage boys everywhere who think they’re over Christmas, but in reality, secretly enjoy it. Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds are now double Christmas movie winners in my book. Ferrell’s Elf is a classic at this point, and Reynolds has the secretly fun Just Friends, thanks to an incredible Anna Faris heater. Talk about mean spirited on that one though, yikes…