In these trying times we may all be in need of a little Christmas spirit. And right now there’s no better place to find it than in director Robert Zemeckis’s magnificent, sparkling new version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” a perennial holiday favorite since it was first published in 1843.

Fear not. Zemeckis has not monkeyed with the original. Many of the words spoken are straight from Dickens himself. So are all the scenes in his ghostly tale of miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, who is visited by four ghosts on Christmas Eve who show him things about his past, present and future that make him forever change his ways and find the goodness and human kindness that were lurking somewhere deep in his penny-pinching heart. Dickens’ tale of hope and redemption always makes the heart quicken at its final resolution. And so it does here.

Zemeckis has employed all sorts of 21st-century camera trickery that awes one. He uses the same performance capture technique employed in his “The Polar Express” five years ago, in which the actors perform in a small enclosed room dressed in bodysuits that are festooned with hundreds of tiny dots whose reflected light is recorded by a bank of computers. The actors have the sparest of props. Their costumes and scenery are added later when the computer images are translated on screen.

Because of this technique, the actors can do things that no mortal actor could do –– Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past, which looks like a candle with a flame for his head, flying across a wintry landscape; the effusively cheery Mr. Fezziwig bounding off his tall chair in a somersault and landing on his feet; a dancer at a party spinning madly above the floor; a hearse careening wildly through the streets of London, pulled by a pair of black steeds that would have made the Headless Horseman proud, their red eyes glaring and steam snorting from their nostrils.

And all in realistic 3-D, which certainly adds another dimension to the story. That’s especially true in the breathtaking opening title sequence when the camera soars over the rooftops of 19th-century London nearly missing the chimney sweeps, peers through a window into an enormous banquet hall, then zooms back down to just above street level where vendors hawk fish and eels and chestnuts and Christmas wreaths. The moment is spectacular and yet it only enhances the story without overwhelming or diminishing its emotional heart.

And at its heart is Jim Carrey, who once played the Grinch who stole Christmas and here plays Scrooge as a man who denies Christmas. It’s a beautiful performance … or several performances. Carrey mostly plays the grouchy curmudgeon who is terrified back into living life to its fullest by the three ghosts sent to him one fateful Christmas Eve by the ghost of his seven-years-dead partner, Jacob Marley.

But Carrey also plays younger versions of himself as well, plus the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come –– seven roles in all. And yet each is distinct. You would be hard pressed to see any hint of Scrooge in the jovial, larger-than-life Ghost of Christmas Present, whom we first see bellowing his welcome to Scrooge from atop an enormous Christmas tree laden with a bounty of goodies, or in the conspiratorial whispering of the flame-headed Ghost of Christmas Present.

But it’s the old Scrooge that rules the film. This is a man who is reluctant to part with tuppence and who has made a god of the gold he sorts in his counting house. He sends away his kindly nephew and a pair of men collecting for a charity. He denies overworked Bob Cratchit from taking a piece of coal from a padlocked box to heat their freezing office. Carrey plays Scrooge with a great dramatic flair, his heart turned to stone. That he so well creates totally different characters in the Christmas ghosts is a personal triumph.

In other roles, Gary Oldman also does a deft chameleon act, from the mouse-like Bob Cratchit to the scary Marley’s Ghost to, yes, Tiny Tim. He and Carrey can do these miracles thanks to the fact that the performance capture technique can create entirely different physical attributes without the pain and fussiness of makeup.

One of the complaints about “The Polar Express,” which was the first time Zemeckis employed the technique, was that the characters had a doll-like plastic look. The system has been improved considerably for “A Christmas Carol,” especially in the adult characters such as Scrooge and the ghosts who have strong facial characteristics. Nevertheless, the film’s children and even some of the incidental adults have an unearthly plastic look to them. And while candles look realistic, logs ablaze in fireplaces have a cartoonish look.

But this is a film whose powerful elements overcome such quibbling, often in scary terms that could frighten impressionable younger children, such as the arrival of the chain-rattling Marley’s Ghost. Zemeckis has staged his visit for maximum effect.

We hear the chains and money boxes that Marley wears clanking up the stairs toward Scrooge’s bedroom. The doorknob in the foreground slowly turns ominously while Scrooge cowers in the background in a wing chair. And Marley’s exit is an inspired bit of fantasy and clever imagination as Scrooge peers out his window to see hundreds of ghostly souls suffering the same chains and unending heartaches of Marley. Fantasy and imagination are what spark this inspired film.

*****A Christmas Carol

Starring: Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Bob Hoskins, Robin Wright Penn.

Rated: PG, contains scary images.

mjanuson@projo.com