HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS : 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas' & 'Two Family House'.

If you're under forty, chances are you grew up loving Theodore Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, and his holiday fable, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Year after year the animated 1966 TV movie charmed us with the happy innocence of Whoville, with inspired nonsense lyrics ("Your brain is full of spiders, you've got garlic in your soul, Mister Griiiiinch--I wouldn't touch you with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole!"), and best of all, with the wicked Grinch himself, that anti-Santa, snapping up every last crumb and tree ornament on his midnight raid. For millions of Americans, Christmas wasn't Christmas without the Grinch deviously scheming to abscond with it. Now, decades later, here comes a ballyhooed big-screen version--with Jim Carrey in the title role, no less--and some parents are all but dragging their kids to the theater to see it.

Alas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas is a colossal bust. Ron Howard's movie goes wrong from the start, when we float down to Whoville, only to find its denizens fitted out with grotesque, piglike snouts. Wait a sec, you mean the Whos are ugly? Whoville itself (assembled on the largest set ever built at Universal) is all tilting minarets and arched bridges, suggesting the curvy, eccentric modernism of a Gaudi or Hundertwasser. It's supposed to be quaint and fantastical, but instead feels suffocatingly cluttered--especially with the Whos racing about in a frenzy of pre-Christmas buying. That's right, the Whos are greedy, too. Apparently neither Howard nor his screenwriters saw that rewriting the Whos as rampaging materialists, far from deepening the fable's moral, would make hash of it. If the Whos have lost their way, how can they help the Grinch find his?

As for the Grinch himself, Carrey transforms Seuss's brooding curmudgeon into a high-octane standup comic. He mugs and winks for the camera, doing voices from Richard Nixon to RuPaul, riffing randomly (on the Hindenburg disaster, for instance, as he torches a Christmas tree and wails, "Oh, the Whomanity!"). "Kids today," he simpers when Cindy Lou Who (Taylor Momsen) fails to be frightened by him, "they're so desensitized by television!" It's manic Jim Carrey shtick; but do we really want a Grinch who says "Cheer up dude, it's Christmas!" or, when stuck in a chimney, "This blasted water weight goes right to my hips!"?

How the Grinch Stole Christmas is way too much--the performances, the writing, the sets and costumes; the sheer $130 million bulk of the thing. Universal's production notes list a crew of sixty make-up artists, seventy computer and visual-effects people, and on and on. No wonder the film feels overdone. Indeed, Howard has created a near-perfect inversion of Seuss's message: all the money in the world, and nary a speck of Christmas magic to be found anywhere.

The old cartoon movie, like the original tale itself, proceeded with sublime efficiency (remember the Christmas tree that folded up like an umbrella?), keeping dialogue and design to a minimum in order to fix our attention on the essential: the state of the Grinch's heart. Howard and his screenwriters get lost in their outsized film, then grope for whatever might pull them out--a sack race in Whoville that turns into Chariots of Fire, or a tedious subplot that sends Cindy Lou Who on the trail of the Grinch's past, revealing the childhood abuses that drove him to exile in the cold crags above Whoville. In 1966 we didn't need an hour of psychological exposition to explain why a miser hated Christmas. Back then it was enough to know that his heart was two sizes too small.

In one sense, none of this matters, of course. Kids find Carrey's manic hijinks a hoot, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas grossed $55 million on its first weekend. Leaving the theater, I couldn't but assign this juiced-up and pointlessly opulent Christmas film, with its week-before-Thanksgiving opening date, to the vast plot to keep us revved for holiday buying all year round. If you find this all too Grinch-like of me, just ask yourself, does the new Grinch film stand a chance of being one people will watch year in and year out?

I wouldn't touch that bet with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole.

Those looking for more authentic Christmas uplift should seek out Raymond De Felitta's Two Family House, another tale of someone whose heart turns out to be bigger than he knows. Buddy Visalo (Michael Rispoli) is a dreamer caught in a prosaic time and place--a young World War II vet in 1950s Staten Island who fantasizes about being a nightclub singer. Back in the service Buddy sang at a show where Arthur Godfrey was present, and Godfrey's chance compliment stoked his fantasy. After the war, his no-nonsense fiancee, Estelle (Katherine Narducci), made discarding his silly dreams a condition of having her, and Buddy hunkered down to the eight-to-six in a machine shop. Now he sits at home watching Julius LaRosa on TV and saying, "That coulda been me."

Wisely, De Felitta never suggests that Buddy is talented enough to be the next Mel Torme. Singing is a metaphor for a man struggling toward the recognition that his life lacks music. Dutifully Buddy labors away, plotting schemes of escape (as a pizza maker, later a house painter) that always fall apart. Finally he buys a dilapidated two-family house, dreaming of opening a club in the bottom floor. And guess who's going to be the opening act.

Problems, problems. The upstairs turns out to be occupied by a drunk named O'Neary (a brief but brilliant performance by Kevin Conway) and his young, extremely pregnant wife, Mary. Goaded by Estelle, Buddy tries to evict the couple, and in the ensuing fracas, Mary gives birth. When the newborn's paternity--the child is black--sparks a local scandal, the husband deserts, and Buddy, pushed again by Estelle, kicks out mother and child. Mary moves into a rundown hotel frequented by prostitutes, as the neighborhood smugly nods. But it doesn't sit right with Buddy. Hesitantly, secretly, he steps in to help.

The charm of Two Family House lies in watching Buddy's conscience surface through the muck of his prejudices, riding a dim, deep intuition that he and the outcast have something in common. "Every man has at least one moment of total selflessness in this life," says the film's voiced-over narrator; but it's more complicated than that. Selflessness is what Buddy already has, married to a woman who despises his dreams. What he needs is more like finding himself, if only he can admit it. Conscience and loneliness together draw him to Mary. "What do you want?" she asks suspiciously, when Buddy keeps appearing at her door. "I just want to talk to someone," he says at last, and soon it all comes pouring out.

Once Buddy gets a taste of intimacy, we know--better than he does--that he'll be back for more. (It doesn't hurt that Kelly MacDonald, the Irish actress who plays Mary, is achingly beautiful.) He doesn't understand that his wife is poison, or that his life is a prison from which a woman who says "sing it for me" when he starts humming along to a melody on the radio has the power to spring him. All he knows is that he has a feeling. But what to do about it? Buddy may sing the romantic standards, but they aren't of his world. The land of crooners floats somewhere in the ether of romance, in movies Buddy surely doesn't go to and in novels he surely doesn't read; it's where we are. Buddy's working-class Italian-American world is about anything but romance. It's about living in your in-laws' house. It's the boys at the bar, the wife and her gossiping girlfriends, the moral scrutiny of family and church. It's the group instead of the two.

Two Family House is a romance, but De Felitta keeps enough bittersweetness in the mix to leave you unsure--and nervous--about how things will end. Discovering Buddy's infidelity, Estelle uses her outrage to crush his dreams once and for all. "You did this because you think you're a big shot," she fulminates. "You think you're somebody you aren't." Through his guilt, Buddy gropes to articulate his unhappiness. The moment hangs in the balance, and you realize how deftly De Felitta has steered his story between comedy and tragedy.

Follow your dream: it's a hackneyed phrase in America, and to make it fresh requires a sense not only of how dreams can redeem, but what they cost as well. Where Buddy comes from, it's one thing to cheat on your wife and then come crawling back; but to actually bail out on a marriage, to ditch your wife for a feeling--and with a notorious woman--means throwing your life away. We can't help rooting for Buddy to know his own heart, but De Felitta never lets us forget how much easier it is for us to say this than it is for Buddy to do it.

Both Michael Rispoli and Katherine Narducci appear in HBO's smash hit series, "The Sopranos," and Two Family House copies that show's trick of giving broad ethnic stereotypes depth, creating a kind of inarticulate eloquence. Radiating the warmth and humor of autobiography (De Felitta based it on the life of a wayward uncle), Two Family House won the audience award this year at Sundance, and it's easy to see why. Get past the criminally forgettable title and you'll be rewarded with one of this season's most delightful small-movie treats.