That's not to say that Howard and his cast and crew haven't gone to a certain amount of trouble in adapting both Dr. Seuss' book and the much-loved 1966 Chuck Jones television version of it. It's just that all their attention has been poured into the wrong details: You get characters walking about with cups of swirling eggnog balanced whimsically on their heads, elaborate chapeaux that are both more garish and less fanciful than anything Seuss (also known as Theodor S. Geisel) ever came up with. And the stylized, curlicued beauty of the Whoville landscape, as Seuss originally drew it and as Jones later adapted it, has been replaced by a tarty Candyland. Forget hearing a Who; you can barely hear yourself think.

But then, Howard's "Grinch" is mainly a vehicle for its star, Jim Carrey, buried beneath layers of prosthetics, makeup and synthetic green fur, and the picture is almost tolerable when he's on-screen. But when he's not, we're forced to endure the antics of the aggressively winsome Whos of Whoville, in Howard's vision a race of rodent-like creatures whose lust for life seems to be driven solely by the desire to buy and receive Christmas presents.

Of course, the Whos have a lesson to learn, but not before we're subjected to a song from the worst of the bunch, the über-adorable Cindy Lou Who (played by Taylor Momsen). With all the earnestness of a child politician, she asks, "Where are you, Christmas?" If you happen to know where it is at the beginning of this scattered, frenetic and superfluous picture, you're entirely likely to have lost sight of it by the end.

There are those who believe the classics (Dante, Shakespeare, Geisel) should never be messed with, but I'm not one of them. In an interview he gave when his spiky and delectably multilayered comedy "Scrooged" was released, Bill Murray noted that there was much discussion on the set regarding how the source text, "A Christmas Carol," should be interpreted. "In the Dickens ...," someone would say, noting the handling of this or that detail, and Murray would interject, "But in the Magoo ..." The point, of course, is that a great work can sustain multiple interpretations. And as much as I knew no one could improve on the Seuss-Jones "Grinch," I did wonder what feats Carrey might be able to pull off in the lead role. But even though Carrey has plenty of screen time, his presence barely registers amid the movie's clutter, which overtakes the essence of the original.

The Seuss-Jones version works because it was a model of economy. At 25 minutes, it flies by like a shot, although it's immeasurably satisfying. Its inventiveness breathes in dozens of crackerjack details: the way the ill-tempered, misanthropic Grinch loosens a tiny sleeping Who's grasp on a candy cane by tapping the end of it with a gentle "tink-tink-tink," or the way a heart-shaped piece of fruit transforms into the shrunken red pupil of the Grinch's eye. And its theme -- that Christmas is about love, not the trappings -- is never allowed to overflow into excessive gooeyness. The Seuss-Jones "Grinch" works because it grooves on a healthy measure of basic human grumpiness. As Jones once said in an interview, "Everybody hates Christmas just a little bit."

That's probably why audiences through the decades have responded so strongly to the story of the Grinch (just as they have to Dickens' Scrooge). But Howard's "Grinch" is so aggressively cheerful, its message both ham-fisted and muddled, that it doesn't allow much space for the audience to feel anything. The sets and costumes are loaded with bright colors, and yet there's something pleasureless and vacant about them. Seuss' landscape looked like a dream vision from another planet, with its curvy mountain peaks and slender, sloping evergreens, and the Who homes were like honeymoon cottages deeply in love with art moderne. Howard's Whoville, with its styrofoam snow peaks and brassy Christmas lights, resembles those generic Christmas Villages that you see in malls, the ones that get shabbier and more depressing with each passing year.

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