Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

Review Essay

I want to acknowledge up front that of all the films on the blog this year, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is going to be the biggest stretch as a “holiday film” of any kind — other than a handful of snowy scenes establishing that it’s wintertime and a single shouted reference to Christmas, this movie really does nothing at all to position itself for the holidays.  But it’s undeniably a film that’s adapting A Christmas Carol, and for this segment, I knew that I wanted one of the Carol adaptations I reviewed to be something really radical in trying to reinvent the story.  The basic structure of Dickens’s novella is so classic and yet so easy to riff on that Wikipedia has an article dedicated just to its adaptations, and it’s enormous: everything from an experimental theatrical production called Fellow Passengers which stages the whole story with just three actors to The Passions of Carol which is apparently an adult film version of the story (um, “adult”, but you know what I mean) to the 1994 TV movie A Flintstones Christmas Carol in which Fred and Barney and Wilma and Betty present the whole story, though how on earth they make that work…well, maybe I’ll watch it someday.  Anyway, I wanted to try something interesting out for the blog that I hadn’t seen before — not The Passions of Carol interesting, but interesting all the same — so I picked Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.  All I knew about it was that it had a really talented cast (three Oscar winners plus Jennifer Garner, and it’s kind of astonishing she hasn’t picked up at least one nomination over the years) and the premise struck me as potentially viable — a cad is transformed by confrontations with the women he’s wronged — so I committed myself to watching it and writing it up.  I, uh, I have made some mistakes in this blogging project, folks, and boy howdy was this one of them.

Before I do that, let’s just be up front about some things about this movie that are so gross, many of you would probably tap out of it immediately, since I nearly did.  The movie’s homophobia and transphobia are depressingly prevalent for a major Hollywood release in the 21st Century — it’s not just characters casually using slurs (though they do) but it’s also a script that thinks it’s super funny to allude, not once but twice, to the idea that you might accidentally have sex with a trans person who tricked you.  It’s not funny either time, but it’s also exhausting enough to me as a cishet person that I have to imagine it would be really grating for someone more personally touched by that kind of joke.  There’s also just so much rampant sexism, including more than a few really gross moments where a man’s abusing a position of power to degrade or objectify a woman — this is the kind of movie that would have been much harder to release after #MeToo, and in the wake of that movement this movie plays even rougher than it probably came across when it was first in theaters.  Furthermore, as I’ll explore later in the review, I think this sexism isn’t just gross as an attitude but it’s also really artistically backwards in a way that damages whatever mileage they were hoping to get out of adapting A Christmas Carol in the first place.

First of all, let’s tackle the movie’s biggest problem — Matthew McConaughey’s Scrooge analogue, Connor Meade, just isn’t Scroogeish in ways that will work for this story structure.  Scrooge is fundamentally miserable in a way that anyone can see: there’s nothing about his life that seems appealing or worthy of someone’s envy.  And I think that’s what makes it possible for us to empathize with his growth as a person in the story — he has absolutely committed acts of really vicious cruelty, but he’s done so much harm to himself in the process that the possibility of healing for everybody involved is a welcome relief.  Connor Meade, on the other hand, is this smiling sleazeball whose whole world (as we are immediately made aware) consists of being good at degrading and objectifying women for fun and profit, in that order.  As the movie presents it, every man wants to be him and every woman wants to do him — every woman but one, of course, the perfect woman and therefore his unattainable heart’s desire.  A movie structured around THAT arc, in which Meade has to give up all his fun and wild times in order to get the one thing the world won’t give him, is an almost perfect inverse of Scrooge’s horrified and awestruck realization that he has been clinging to wounds and woundedness, and that there will be a release of joy in his life by unburdening himself from wanting literally anything more than to see other people made happy.  Sure, the screenplay attempts to make the connection — at one point, while Meade is breaking up with three women simultaneously on one Skype call (I can’t believe it either, folks, and I saw it with my own two eyes), he is accused by them of having taken their love without returning it, “hoarding love like a miser”.  Yeah, it makes no sense in context either.  Also, this film absolutely does not present women in general as offering Connor Meade anything other than casual, gleeful sex, and as the screenplay makes repeatedly and tediously obvious, he’s been more than happy to return the favor, no hoarding whatsoever.

Nearly as huge a problem, though, is Michael Douglas’s Jacob Marley analogue, Uncle Wayne — in fact, Uncle Wayne’s an even bigger swing and miss by the screenplay, but as a secondary character he perhaps does a little less damage.  Here’s the problem with Uncle Wayne in a single phrase: he’s not repentant.  Like, not even a little.  He was a grade A slimeball whose toxic attitudes about women he instilled in an impressionable young Connor — now that he’s dead, you might think he’s come to terms with how disgusting he was being, but no, he just has some vague hand-waving to do about how Connor, he’s got this special connection to Jenny (poor, poor Jennifer Garner in yet another thankless role) and that’s real special now, you don’t want to keep having fun with thousands of hot younger women, you want to settle down.  The screenplay might as well have him say “I had my kicks, Connor, but you shouldn’t have yours”.  He keeps reappearing throughout the movie, too, but only because the movie seems to think we will find him a charming jerk, I guess — also because he looms large in the “Ghost of Girlfriends Past” sequence as Connor’s surrogate father after being orphaned.  Regardless, though, he’s so consistently awful: he makes a joke to Connor in middle school that alleges that Connor’s middle school girlfriend has an STD, and even at the end of the movie after Connor’s “redemption” there’s Uncle Wayne in the corner, hitting on a ghost who reminds him she’s underage.  Jacob Marley’s power in the original comes from his hauntedness — he is burdened by the gravity of his own harms, and he is panicked for the safety of his dear old friend who is blithely continuing to forge an ever-longer chain.  Scrooge is genuinely rattled by Marley up front, begging him to “speak comfort” to him — before even the first Spirit’s arrival, Scrooge has already come into contact with real fear.  Without that context, we are just cruising into Connor’s past as though it might be fun to revisit all these “conquests” — language I cringe to use but it’s definitely how this film treats sexual interactions between men and women, at least.

And then, though I think Emma Stone’s Ghost is probably the best performance in the movie, we hit a Past segment that just sucks.  It sucks to have Connor hero-worshipping sleazeball Uncle Wayne — didn’t the screenwriters recognize that what Scrooge found to admire in his own past was the warm and friendly Fezziwig whose generosity stood in stark contrast to Scrooge’s adult life, and not some cruel miser who had inspired Scrooge’s life of misdeeds?  It sucks to see Emma Stone’s good work undermined by such stupid writing — when she (Connor’s first intimate partner) takes him to the scene of their first and only time, she starts hyping herself up like she was Neal Armstrong landing on the Moon.  Watching a 20 year old actress playing a 15 year old girl dancing next to 40 year old Matthew McConaughey about how pumped she is that she got to be the first person to sleep with Connor Meade, King of Sex….  Wait, what was the point of this sequence?  Oh right, how sad and empty all this action makes him.  I guess.  Honestly, half of the movie’s problem, everywhere and at all times, is how little it ascribes agency to Connor and how much it treats women in the aggregate and in specific as a problem for him.  In a memorably awful scene, we see Connor confronted en masse by every woman he’s ever slept with — they descend on him like some rabid horde, desperate for him, and he emerges from the vision terrified.  But here’s the thing — what’s terrifying Connor is the women and their insatiable lusts.  Not his own greed and harm.  It would be like Scrooge having a vision of the money at the bank trying to drown him and then waking up, scared of the bad, bad gold for making him foreclose on all those mortgages.

The real world sequences into which Connor keeps being reinserted between Ghost segments — another notable departure from the Christmas Carol outline — are bad in another way, and again it has to do with the film’s relentless misogyny.  Connor’s at a wedding, the wedding of his brother in fact, and so we keep seeing various elements and characters of the wedding appear on screen — a lunatic bridezilla who, as presented, seems like someone who would be awful for Connor’s brother to marry.  Three horndog bridesmaids who seem to have made a bet with each other over who can first “land” Connor Meade if you know what I mean and honestly, dear reader, I hope you don’t.  I hope by this point you’ve dissociated and are in a happier mental place.  About the only non-awful people at the wedding are Connor’s brother Paul who still believes in him — the story’s Fred analogue — and then Jenny (the prize for becoming Good Connor) and Brad, a kind, empathetic, professional dude who’s hitting it off with Jenny and therefore is treated purely as an obstacle / plot device by the screenplay and not, you know, a real person who has his own journey to make.  I’d complain about Jenny not getting to be a real person either but by now I’m figuring we’re all clear on how all female characters are treated here — it’s just interesting, I guess, to notice that the only men who treat women as having agency are also being brushed aside.

I think the underlying challenge here is that the movie has no real thesis.  Dickens, goodness knows, had a thesis about the cruelty and inhumanity of early Victorian England — we can be as critical as we like of the ways Dickens’s treatment of social harm presents it too much as individual sinfulness and not enough as systemic and systematic harm imposed on a large scale, but the guy had identified an actual problem and wanted to awaken some kind of human response to address it.  What is the problem here, in this film?  At one point, Connor goes on a rant about how “these days” we’ve made being single a crime…dear reader, you are living in the 21st Century.  If you had to make a list of the problems we face “these days,” would that have made your top 100?  It would not have made mine.  Are we expected to believe that men like Uncle Wayne and Connor would have found happiness and joy in faithful monogamy had the women of America not been uniformly sexually predatory (except for Jenny and I guess whoever Uncle Wayne’s Jenny was)?  The film seems to kind of believe that Connor screwed up by not “going for it” with Jenny when they were about 11 years old and she had a crush on him, but what exactly is that argument?  The one time in his life Connor didn’t treat a woman like a scratch-off lottery ticket, it was somehow the wrong thing to do?  There’s a hint at times of a much more unsettlingly awful thesis — namely, that negging and other forms of cruel game playing “work” on women to an almost universal extent and that therefore this is, from a certain perspective, kind of their fault.  But the less said about that kind of garbage the better — that particular element really pinpoints this movie as having been made in the late 2000s, in the years immediately after Neil Strauss’s deplorable but then-ubiquitous pickup artist advice book, The Game, hit shelves.

Fundamentally, the structure of A Christmas Carol isn’t working in this movie because the Ghosts aren’t really there to do what the Ghosts do in Dickens’s novella.  The original version is designed to make Scrooge mindful of humanity — to connect him empathetically with human caring and human concern, and to give him a perspective on his own life as it might appear to others around him.  The Ghosts in this version seem primarily to be working to convince him that he would be happier with Jenny than he is chasing an endless parade of hot women around hotel rooms — I’m not saying that’s bad advice, to be clear, especially given that I much prefer my own domestic situation to Connor Meade’s life as presented in the film’s opening act.  But it’s so selfishly focused: the Ghosts’ advice is rarely about the harm Connor’s done to others or the good he might have done, and instead is on trying to persuade this scoundrel that he’s more miserable than he lets on, but he can fix it all with the right woman, who fortunately for him has had the undying hots for him since sixth grade.  I feel like in the end the only thing Connor’s learned is that he should have been willing to make the personal sacrifice of staying in bed and snuggling Jennifer Garner, a sacrifice I imagine millions of American men (heck, people of any gender) would find it pretty darn easy to make, themselves, without having paranormal visitation on the subject.

I haven’t gotten much into the movie’s later developments — honestly, I think it gets more depressing as it goes.  I could have gone all my life without hearing Connor Meade — post-two-ghosts, by the way, this guy should be on the verge of personal realization and redemption — saying the phrase “your little estrogen lynch mob.”  He then meets the Ghost of Girlfriends Yet to Come and starts hitting on her, at which point, folks, I just started laughing.  Not at the film, but just at the fact that I had decided to watch this thing.  I mean, come on.  Imagine if Scrooge meets the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and the first words out of his mouth were “oh great, you’re here, let’s go imprison a debtor together, shall we?”  The movie doesn’t even believe in its own half-assed redemption arc.  Why should we?  And yet, I guess I’ll say this — this stretch of the film, before the finale, is probably the best, most Christmas Carol-like it gets.  Yet to Come is mute, Connor faces his own death and is panicked, there’s something happening for him even if it’s not particularly inspiring.  And then there’s a car chase and an ex-Marine gets punched out and Connor Meade gets to deliver a preachy, heavy-handed message about the power of love and happiness and why am I still writing about this film.  Seriously, folks — if you can’t get that Scrooge ought to spend the final sequence of A Christmas Carol doing good for others (and not lecturing others while doing some good for himself/his boys), you should not have undertaken the work of writing an adaptation of A Christmas Carol in any medium, let alone an expensive Hollywood motion picture.  The End.

I Know That Face: Breckin Meyer, who plays Connor’s optimistic but increasingly frustrated brother Paul, appears in Go, a 1999 black comedy thriller that is not at all a holiday film but is also absolutely set at Christmas: in other words, it’s probably as much a holiday movie as Die Hard is, and therefore a movie I’ll cover here at some point, I assume.  In Go, Meyer plays “Tiny”, a supporting role as the buddy of Simon, the guy who was supposed to sell ecstasy to his co-worker before he left for Vegas, and oh boy I just cannot summarize this movie: it’s a trip.  Paul’s bridezilla fiancée Sandra is played by Lacey Chabert, who is Dana, one of many bodies to hit the floor in the horror flick Black Christmas (the 2006 version, for those who know there are more than one).  Chabert then gets into the world of Hallmark Channel acting so successfully that there’s no way I can name all of the many Christmas TV movies she appears in, but if you’re thinking “hey, wasn’t she in that one cheesy holiday movie,” you are absolutely correct.  Most recently and memorably, she plays the leading lady role in Hot Frosty, Netflix’s “let’s say a grieving widow found a snowman so attractive he became her real life lover” answer to the question “what if we made Jack Frost but way, way weirder?”.  At this point, I hope Ms. Chabert is at least having a chat with her agent about which scripts she gets shown, but maybe she’s having fun and if so more power to her.  And Daniel Sunjata, who plays the perfect potential boyfriend Brad (whom Jenny really should end up with instead of Connor), has one other holiday appearance, in a Disney TV movie entitled Christmas…Again?! as Mike Clybourne, the single father of a 12 year old who turns Christmas into Groundhog Day with an errant wish.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Present: There’s so little of A Christmas Carol here in any kind of genuine fashion, but I guess I’ll give it to them that ultimately our “Scrooge” figure is ushered by a mute spirit of Yet to Come to his own gravesite, only to wake up and sprint to his window and shout to a boy below “What day is it?  Is it Christmas Day?”  That’s not just the most Christmas Carol moment in the script, but it’s one of the few that I would argue seems to actually work.  

Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent: <insert full text of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens>  I mean, there’s no point trying to make a list this time around.  There are Ghosts and a put-upon personal employee and a sad childhood memory but even in those cases this is missing so much of what makes the original special, and the list of things they’re not even attempting is vast.

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Christmas Carol Vibes (2.5/10): Let’s put this as charitably as possible: I’ll admit that this is, fundamentally, a story about how an awful person is changed by an encounter with a bad and deceased former role model, followed by three spirits who represent the harm he has done, is doing, and is gonna do.  He seems happier in the end.  That’s about as far as I can take it.  Otherwise, this is just a version of the story that is out of touch with the novella’s moral universe — it does not understand what’s wrong with Scrooge, or what Marley hopes to awaken in him, or why the Ghosts and their visitations get through to Scrooge, or what it is that Scrooge has learned in the end.  It is more like A Christmas Carol than Die Hard is, or Home Alone, but not by much.

Actual Quality (2/10): I cannot believe there’s a movie bad enough to make me long for my experience watching some of my earlier panned movies, but I would gladly watch Jack Frost twice if it meant I never had to watch this movie once.  Everything about the screenplay (and direction) in this film works against what few strengths the performers brought to the film, so that even when they’re successful, it’s upsetting.  I’m slightly afraid that one of you will turn out to be a huge fan of this one, but I guess if you do, we’ll see what you have to tell me.  I really can’t imagine coming to like this film, though, regardless of what I hear about it!

Scrooge?  Oy.  I mean, McConaughey’s doing a serviceable job bringing Connor Meade to life — as noted above, though, what’s frustrating about this portrayal is that it has so little to do with Scrooge in A Christmas Carol that I don’t think I got anything new or helpful out of it.  The highest praise I can give this performance is that the character as written is pretty insufferably awful, and Matthew must have acted it well, since I really, really dislike Connor Meade even when he’s reformed at the movie’s end.  

Supporting Cast?  The cast as a whole is under-served by the material, which I’ll acknowledge up front: we can’t possibly hold all these actors accountable for the mess they’re inhabiting.  And yet I’d also say that at least most of them are not doing the script any favors, much of the time.  For praise, I’ll single out Emma Stone in certain scenes (in the Girlfriend Past role), and Jennifer Garner at least some of the time (acting as this film’s Belle, I guess, maybe mixed with Tiny Tim but what am I even saying anymore) persuades me that there’s a real character on her side of this broken relationship.  Otherwise, this cast mostly consists of performances I wish I could forget (and I bet they wish it also).

Recommended Frequency?  I have no idea why anyone would watch this even once.  I am absolutely never going to watch it again.  I would promise to do better research in the future, but I do expect that at least one side benefit of a blogging project like this one is occasionally getting to watch the blogger suffer for our own amusement.  If so, I hope you’ve enjoyed this with my compliments, and I’m sure I’ll walk into a fence post again for your entertainment sometime again, either this season or next year.

What are you doing here?  Go watch something else.  Okay, fine, if you’re saying “there’s no way this is as gross and unendurable as James is saying, I’ve got to see it”, Max will show it to you if you’re a subscriber. You can rent it from every streaming service that rents movies, as far as I can tell, and if you want it on DVD for a white elephant gift exchange with people you don’t like that much, Amazon will sell it to you for less than $5.00 because in this case, at least, the free market is accurately assessing the supply and demand curves for this film.  This thing is on disc in over 1,400 Worldcat libraries — a huge increase over basically every other film I’ve yet checked in Worldcat — because we live in an unjust universe.  If you check it out of the library, that circulation data may convince them to keep the DVD on their shelves, so I advise against it strongly.  And if you do love this movie, friend, I am sorry for being this hard on it, but it’s one of the worst things I’ve watched as an adult: I guess I would invite you to change my mind, but honestly we should both probably just save our time for other things.