Based On, If Any: The Polar Express (2004)

A Polarizing Christmas Flick

Brittany Menjivar is watching adaptations for her monthly column, Based On, If Any. Today, Robert Zemeckis’ bizarre holiday fable starring Tom Hanks vs. Chris Van Allsburg’s beloved source material.

If you’re just tuning in, Britt watched Secretary (2002), and Rave Macbeth (2001).

Happy Holidays,
🎅🏻AV

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A Polarizing Christmas Flick: on The Polar Express (2004)

“There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long long ago…”

This lyric from Andy Williams’ “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” has puzzled countless modern listeners. Scary ghost stories? Wrong holiday, pal—Halloween was three years ago! I remarked in my head as a child. Yet my adult self realizes that Andy was onto something. In the words of another great crooner—Fred Figglehorn, to be precise—Christmas mythos can be “kinda creepy” when considered in a certain light. Think about Charles Dickens’ eerie trio of ghosts, the Rat King from The Nutcracker, the giant rock man from the Barbie adaptation of that tale…

Perhaps the creepiest thing about (commercial) Christmas celebrations is that they’re predicated on a falsehood: the existence of Santa Claus. Sure, the legend of Santa gestures toward truth—St. Nicholas was a real man who generously gave surprise gifts to the less fortunate. But that doesn’t explain the extensive mythos children are tasked with making sense of during Christmastime: the surveillance aspect (“he knows when you’ve been bad or good”), the reindeer on the roof, the suddenly appearing gift boxes. If you’re a clever kid, all of this might inspire perplexity rather than excitement. No film captures the feeling of distress brought on by “the great Christmas mystery” like The Polar Express—perhaps because The Polar Express is so mysterious itself. I’ve watched this movie every Christmas since it came out in 2004—that’ll make 20 viewings of The Polar Express this year—and I still don’t fully comprehend all of the forces at play in Robert Zemeckis’ bizarre holiday fable. The plot: a young boy skeptical of Santa, but eager to believe, is surprised when a massive locomotive pulls up outside of his house, on a mission to bring children to the North Pole. Of course, there’s so much more: tap-dancing waiters who sing about hot chocolate, a creepy train car full of broken toys, a hobo who speaks in riddles.

Only a few years ago did I realize that The Polar Express was based on a picture book by Chris Van Allsburg. This year, I finally decided to crack open the cover, in hopes of demystifying this Christmas classic once and for all. I finished the story with more questions than answers. Perhaps that’s what Santa would have wanted.

Years before I asked my parents whether Santa was real, I asked them if The Polar Express was animated or live action. Little did I know that the film would go on to become an oft-cited example of the “uncanny valley” effect, which occurs when something comes so close to portraying a lifelike human but misses ever so slightly. Thankfully, the picture book’s artwork is realistic in a beautiful rather than a jarring sense. Zemeckis must have drawn heavily from Van Allsburg’s visuals while storyboarding. Certain scenes matched frames from the film such that I could almost see them lurching into action—the waiters bringing the children hot chocolate; the train whizzing past wolves in the forest; the elves filling the North Pole’s town square. Their beauty reminds the reader that illustrations don’t serve to replace the imagination, but to set it into motion—like a train flying down a winding track.

The book closely adheres to the narrator’s POV: we follow along while “Hero Boy,” as he would later be dubbed by Zemeckis, boards the train and eventually comes face-to-face with Santa himself. Santa gives him a silver bell from his sleigh; when he’s back on the train, Hero Boy realizes that it slipped through a hole in his pocket. He’s devastated until, on Christmas morning, he finds it wrapped up in his living room—a true miracle. This short and sweet allegory is perfect for younger readers to digest: a tale of whimsy that bridges the gap between the promise of the unknown and the comfort of the familiar. But if you’re a fan of the movie, you may feel that something is missing from the narrative: there is no Tom Hanks.

In The Polar Express (2004), Tom Hanks is basically God. This is not an exaggeration. The actor voices three characters: Santa, the Conductor, and the train-hopping Hobo catching a ride. A popular theory holds that each of these characters represents a person of the Christian Trinity: Santa the Father, Conductor the Son, and Hobo the Holy Spirit.

The first two comparisons check out. Santa is a kindly overseer who “knows if you’ve been bad or good,” and the Conductor’s “All aboard!” mimics Jesus’ call for all people to “come to the Father” through him. The Hobo’s deal is not as immediately obvious. The first time Hero Boy interacts with him, he’s sitting atop the train next to a bonfire he has built there. He spends most of the conversation letting out a weird wheezing laugh at everything Hero Boy says; he then asks him his persuasion on the “Big Man,” and Hero Boy warbles, “I want to believe.” After this conveniently vague exchange, the Hobo asks, “Do you believe in ghosts?” When the Hero Boy says no, the Hobo responds, “Interesting.”

The Hobo’s spectral nature might seem out of place for a Christmas film—but the Holy Spirit is also known as the Holy Ghost. According to Christian theology, the Holy Spirit guides and inspires believers as they attempt to discern the truth. This certainly explains the Hobo’s tendency to challenge Hero Boy, causing him to examine his beliefs and experiences in a new light—but still, every time the credits roll, I long for more lore.

I was hoping that the picture book would elucidate the Hobo’s background. I would not have complained if Van Allsburg’s Polar Express was a biography explaining the Hobo’s upbringing, failed romantic pursuits, and supernatural powers. I was surprised to learn that he wasn’t a part of Van Allsburg’s initial vision, but also happy to know that the film successfully pulled off such a major deviation from the source. The standard Santa mythology is rather cut-and-dry; the Hobo’s storyline introduces the idea that even if we strongly hold certain convictions, the machinations of the universe may not always be so clear—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A positive message for the youth, I’d say.

In addition to the literal Triune God, Zemeckis incorporates some other new characters—fellow pint-sized travelers who can test and reassure Hero Boy in equal measure. One of these, a little boy named Billy, induces more bafflement. Despite the fact that he is maybe five years old, Billy’s defining personality trait is that he is a militant atheist (effectively). Dressed in a drab nightgown that makes him look like a Victorian orphan, he is the human embodiment of misery; if you Google “Billy Polar Express,” “Billy the Lonely Boy” comes up as his official character name.

Billy’s deal is that he is poor and has never received presents from Santa; therefore, Santa must be a sham. (“Christmas just… doesn’t work out for me” is his most quotable line.) His deductive reasoning might be sound in our world, but reason itself is the sham in Zemeckis’ realm. When Billy reaches the North Pole, he finds Santa in the flesh—and realizes that he did indeed reserve a present for him. This begs the question, If Santa is real, why did he leave Billy hanging all these years? One might similarly ask, If God is real, why did he allow Billy’s family to live in poverty?—but that’s hardly a perfect analogue. Amongst Christian schools of thought, there are multiple theories speculating on the extent of God’s involvement in mortal affairs; Santa’s modus operandi has always been pretty unambiguous. The situation gets even more complicated when you consider the film’s ending, when Hero Boy’s parents seem perplexed about the bell under the tree, as if they’re thinking, Hey, we didn’t leave that one there! So Santa visits only select children, or at least doesn’t visit every child with the same frequency—and when he does swing by their houses, he does so without their parents’ awareness?

As you may have guessed, given how convoluted his storyline sounds, Billy is completely absent from the original text, so my read-through didn’t offer any clarity. Here the adaptation failed to improve upon the original. Hero Boy is already a Santa skeptic; his story of transformation is strong enough on its own. Zemeckis didn’t need to throw in some annoying stock character with a similar emotional arc to hammer in the moral of the story for us. The only possible justification for Billy’s presence in the film is that his whining and moaning leads Hero Boy to realize just how obnoxious nonbelievers can be.

Yet another cryptic character in the mix—possibly my favorite of the kids—is Hero Girl. Hero Girl, whose motion capture is partially provided by Tinashe, serves as a foil to the protagonist, anchored by her unwavering optimism as the train twists and turns its way to the Pole. Early in the film, Hero Girl accidentally loses her train ticket, which the Conductor has warned her not to do. When the Conductor finds out, he ushers her out of the train car and returns without her. Hero Boy goes looking for her and finds her… driving the train.

This plot point has always stumped me. When Hero Boy asks her why she’s driving the train, she says the engineer had to check the locomotive’s headlight. OK, but why does Hero Girl specifically have to do his job? Judging by the order of events as well as the children’s startled reactions, it initially seems that she’s being punished by being separated from the group, but when Hero Boy finally finds her, she’s excited to have been given the responsibility.

On the metaphorical level, we could come up with a few explanations: what seems like a setback might actually be an opportunity? God (Tom Hanks) works in mysterious ways? On the narrative level, the cause and effect between the girl losing her ticket and the girl being asked to do child labor (as a reward) is never established. And yet, the sequence where Hero Boy roams throughout the train to locate his new friend remains one of my favorites. Plot twists so often feel cheap or predictable—it’s rare that one should open an entirely new door.

According to Christian theology, the reason for the season is a God-Man for whom reason is no object. Questioning what we’ve always held to be “logical” can be frightening. Yet there is a freedom in believing that something beyond your own ego matters–isn’t so much doubt grounded in a fear of being wrong?–in letting the train take you away. We may never understand all of life’s mysteries, but we can derive meaning from what we do know—and after all these years, this is what I’ve gleaned from The Polar Express. If that message doesn’t do it for you, perhaps the grandeur of the visuals will—after all, isn’t so much of the Christmas ethos about how striking sights (a light display, the first snow) can move us to transformative awe?

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BRITTANY MENJIVAR studied creative writing and film at Yale University. Now, she works and plays in the City of Angels. Britt’s a columnist for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the author of poetry and prose collection Parasocialite, the screenwriter behind award-winning thriller short “Fragile.com,” and the co-founder of literary reading series Car Crash Collective.