I can’t say I’ve completely given up on there being good Christmas movies released these days–there are so blasted many movies being produced, none of us should ever give up hope for that. The numbers are eventually on our side after all! But I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the film from AppleTV+ Spirited. Spoilers abound from here.
As you can probably tell from the trailer, Spirited is a complex retelling of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. There are a couple of hooks at work here. First, Ryan Reynolds’ character (who has a name, but I don’t remember it and it really doesn’t matter anyway) is “unredeemable.” The Ghost of Christmas Present wants to try anyway, and what we learn is that not only is Ryan Reynolds unredeemable, but he also corrupts everyone he runs into. Within the minutes of their arrival, the vision of the past the Ghost has taken him to is in flames, the Ghost of Christmas Present–who we learn is ‘Scrooge’ of the original Christmas Carol who has reformed–has fallen into old habits and is both fighting with coworkers and questioning whether or not he has really changed. (That questioning is a plot hole that kind of disappears by the end of the film.)
Don’t get me wrong, this movie is kind of a mess in terms of its message. The key question of the film is over whether or not people can change. And this is an important–even a critical question–that Christianity has a complex answer to. People can change, in fact if we are to have any hope of salvation, of repenting and turning in faith to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, people must change. But likewise we cannot change by ourselves, we need external (and Supernatural) assistance. Which of course Ryan Reynolds’ character gets in this film. We also see that change is both caused by and demonstrated in self-sacrificial giving. So much is fairly standard, true, and perfectly normal in a Christmas movie.
The problem, the film also throws in the idea that all of us have both good and evil in us, and we have to daily choose the good. Again, there’s some truth to this. We are all made in God’s image and we are fallen. We have both good and evil in us, and we have the obligation to choose the good as well as some limited ability to do so in the civil sense. Hopefully you can see the conflict here: if we already have good and evil in us, change is much less necessary. We need to change our behavior, but not who we are. But then again, that’s not much of a change. Supernatural intervention really isn’t necessary if what we need is already inside of us.
Again, there are two true ideas at work here, the film just can’t decide which it wants to have as its theme and as a result the two conflicting with each other and the big themes at the end of the film are kind of a mess. Fortunately, it’s still a good movie with a lot of fun music, good humor, and cast that are doing their jobs well.
Highly recommended.
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
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