The Grinch (2018)

Another December, another Grinch. Illumination's 2018 model arrives with the polished sheen of a studio that has studied the marketplace and concluded that nostalgia, when rendered in sufficient gloss, is a renewable resource. Benedict Cumberbatch growls, Pharrell Williams narrates, and Whoville glows like a department store window. The enterprise is competent, well funded, and entirely content to be a product.

The film's social consciousness is thin and mostly incidental. Rashida Jones, Kenan Thompson, and Pharrell Williams appear in the voice cast, though the Whos are not racialized beings and nobody involved seems to have regarded their presence as a statement. Cindy Lou's mother Donna is a harried single parent, and the child's arc involves lightening that load, which reads as family sentiment more than any argument about labor or gender. The story's old Seussian insistence that Christmas is not about the presents carries a faint anti-consumerist hum, the sort that has decorated holiday specials since the 1960s. It is a moral about generosity, not a manifesto about redistribution.

What the film does preach, gently and often, is that loneliness is bad and friendship is good. The Grinch's grumpiness is traced to childhood neglect, not to any clinical framing, and his redemption arrives through communal singing. This is warm, harmless, and devoid of ideology. We are left with a handsomely made remake of a book adaptation, a box office champion that will be forgotten by February and revived every November thereafter. Its cultural ambitions are two sizes too small, and it seems at peace with that.