Scrooged (1988)

Review Essay:

On Sundays at FFTH, I take on adaptations of Charles Dickens’s classic novella, A Christmas Carol.  This year, as with last, I tried to bring in one adaptation of the novella that’s more daring (and diverts more from the original text) in an attempt to see what kinds of interesting art can be made from the underlying structure of the tale.  And much as with last year’s total failure (I found Ghosts of Girlfriends Past almost unendurably awful, as you can see from the review I’m linking to there), Scrooged just really, really doesn’t work for me.  It’s at least a little better in my eyes than the openly misogynistic romantic “comedy” I watched last year, but after multiple tries, I just can’t find much sympathy in me for this approach to the story.  Let’s see if I can unpack where I think it goes wrong.

At the beginning of the movie, though, I almost thought they had it worked out.  Cross and his lackeys are screening promos for various movies, and it’s clear: this is the Bah Humbug of 1980s America, in which Christmas is not dismissed, but rather it’s treated so cynically that all sincere sentiment in connection with the holiday has been eradicated.  What’s hard to take from the beginning, though, and never really gets calibrated successfully in my opinion, is the character of Frank Cross as played by Bill Murray: Murray, of course, is responsible for some truly remarkable and successful film performances, but he’s also an actor with a weirdly limited range, especially in the earlier stages of his career.  There’s no question that Cross as a character needs to be unpleasant—he’s Scrooge!—and in that sense, casting Murray to play this pompous, sardonic, condescending, panicky television executive can work, since he’s got the capacity to do that well.  Murray’s impulses as a comedian, though, undermine his performance here as an actor, since he trades in his opportunities to exhibit some kind of character growth for the chances to land quippy one-liners or the perfect smirk.  But it’s not just Bill’s fault: I think the screenplay is also so in love with the idea of all the jokes it can generate out of him in the lead role that it doesn’t give him much of a man to play even if he’d tried harder to do so.  I’ve enjoyed Murray in lots of films, even movies that count on a certain level of cringeworthiness to succeed (What About Bob?, anyone?), but I’ve watched Scrooged multiple times and I’ve never been able to invest myself at all in his performance.  There’s something desperate about it, like an actor who understands the film isn’t quite working while he’s making it, but he can’t figure out how to fix it from the inside.

I think that the film’s sense of humor overall is really where I consistently struggled to figure out what the filmmakers were trying to do.  A Christmas Carol definitely can be funny: Scrooge loves a good wisecrack, and many of the surrounding cast of characters are people in a light-hearted mood.  But the tone of Scrooged is so sour.  The character of Loudermilk is one example: he’s one of Cross’s underlings, who gets dressed down and then fired in the film’s opening minutes.  Thereafter, he keeps reappearing in the film, but almost always just so that there can be some gag in which he is mistreated again, often by Cross (directly or indirectly).  To me, there’s just no sympathy in the film for him: every single joke is punching down at a guy who exists only to be humiliated.  We’re supposed to laugh at how pathetic Loudermilk is, or at least the scenes are shot and edited like comedy sketches, rather than as haunting examples of the way Cross mistreats those under him.  Imagine if A Christmas Carol was designed so that, when Scrooge maliciously refuses coal to Bob Cratchit, we get a reaction shot of Bob turning blue that’s intended to make us laugh at how miserable he is.  Do they know what this story is about?  And Loudermilk’s not even the worst example of this: one of Cross’s many enemies is a woman from the network censorship office who is worried about the “family-friendly” nature of his crass, exploitative, live TV cavalcade, and she seems to exist in the story purely to be abused (often physically) for laughs like she’s one of the Three Stooges.  Except the Stooges are main characters and the audience is expected to root for them, whereas I can only describe the treatment of the network censor as accidentally misogynistic at best (and honestly, it doesn’t feel accidental to me).  The problem extends to the Spirits themselves, whose sense of humor is as mean-spirited as the rest of the movie’s: Christmas Past and Christmas Present are supposed to be here for Scrooge’s welfare, trying to wake in him a less callous and more humane understanding of himself.  I honestly don’t know what the heck the movie thinks it’s up to, but here, the Spirits are tormentors on a level that has nothing really to do with Dickens.  Christmas Past steals from Loudermilk for his own amusement—can we imagine a world in which one of the Spirits steals something from the Cratchits, as a joke at their expense?  Christmas Present seems to have been written as a woman who is simultaneously a sexually adventurous flirt with Cross, a hyperactive toddler he needs to manage, and a comically violent menace whose primary goal is to hurt Frank repeatedly…I have no clue why any of it is happening, other than that someone thought it would be funny.  If it makes you laugh, friend, I’m glad for you but also I don’t think I understand why.

Honestly, the humor is so bleak that I tried to construct an understanding of this movie as essentially a parody of A Christmas Carol.  I wouldn’t have much sympathy with the ethics of a film that thinks the Dickens classic is goody two-shoes nonsense, but I think I would at least find the motion picture interesting as a curiosity: can you persuade us that it’s dramatically satisfying to have an unrepentant Scrooge, surrounded by Spirits who are supposed to reform him but are having more fun being as gleefully mean as he is?  But that’s definitely not what this film is doing.  One reason is that they’ve cast the luminous Karen Allen, a woman who deserves SO much more than this screenplay is giving her, as Claire (the equivalent to Scrooge’s Belle), a dedicated social worker and professional bleeding heart.  It’s clear that the movie wants us to understand that she’s a good person and Frank needs to reform himself to get her back—a prospect as baffling and implausible as the primary relationship dynamic in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, sure, but it’s the obvious point of the movie nevertheless.  At this point, I think I’ve decided that any Christmas Carol adaptation that wants to give Scrooge romantic happiness at the end is likely doomed to failure: it just requires too forgiving a woman (or else too appealing a Scrooge), and it turns his reform into something he’s doing in order to win a prize rather than a genuine change of heart.  And as I alluded to earlier, this movie is going to end with a sincere (well, sincere except for a final few jokes they couldn’t stop themselves from adding in) expression of holiday sentiment and goodwill from Frank Cross to the world via television broadcast.  A rich and self-satisfied man with no previous holiday spirit to speak of will suddenly lecture millions of viewers at home about their own callousness in watching the TV program he himself created and shoved down their throats….okay, that part actually does seem true to life, let’s give it to the movie.  Anyway, my point is, Scrooged, in trying to be both a black comedy and a soaring ode to virtue, is a film at war with itself, and as a viewer, I wanted to surrender.

What goes well?  Like I said, I think the jokes in the opening scenes are mostly aimed right: the film’s mocking sensationalism and the exploitation of Christmas for media stardom and millions in profits, and I get why the initial pitch for this movie persuaded producers and talent that it could be a great update of A Christmas Carol.  Grace, Cross’s long-suffering servant and our closest Cratchit analogue, has a story with some heart, and my few glimpses of her with her family made me wish I was watching her story instead of Frank’s.  Although I think the Christmas Past spirit is very badly written as a character, at least some of that segment of the movie works, especially Cross’s memories of his relationship with Claire, which feel authentic enough that there’s some real emotion in the break-up, and you can see where a better kind of Frank once existed.  I do think that some of the scare tactics of the ghosts/spirits work effectively (even though—or maybe because—they are pretty disgusting, like the Marley equivalent’s disintegrating body).  And, though here I’m at odds with the motion picture itself, I kind of like the character of Bryce Cummings, an “L.A. slimeball” (to quote Frank) who’s here to threaten Cross’s hold on his job—the screenplay sees him as a villain because he’s Frank’s antagonist and needs to be humiliated in the final act in order to give Frank a happy ending.  But what I liked about Cummings is how mean he is to Frank—in a way, he’s revealing that Cross was never as good at being a big shot as he wanted to be, and given how horrifyingly Frank’s treated everyone else in his life, I loved seeing our Scrooge character squirm for once as someone being thwarted by his competition.  I’m not sure how the movie itself doesn’t get that Cummings isn’t the villain—Scrooge is his own villain.  Whatever process this screenplay went through, I feel sure that too many hands touched it, and the result is an incoherent mess.

In the end, I think part of what I respond to negatively in Scrooged is just that I live in a world run by Frank Crosses, where media moguls (and the ghouls they have made famous) dominate far too much of society, amusing themselves excessively at the expense of people they think of as extras.  If I’m going to see a story about a Frank Cross, I need it to contend with his monstrous capacity for harm in a way that I can make sense of.  The narrative presented by Scrooged, on the other hand, is a chaotic muddle—a film that thinks Frank is funny enough that we can’t help chuckling at his mistreatment of others, but also redeemable enough that he won’t even need to apologize for most of that in order to get us to forgive him.  It wants to satirize an industry that fills our screens with sex and violence and special effects…but one of the consequences of that is a film selling itself to us with a lot of those very elements.  And even the movie at its most noble remains confused: what is the lesson Frank Cross needed to learn?  (His “Marley”—a former network boss named Hayward—is confusing to me.  He arrives neither chained nor haunted by any specific misdeeds, telling Cross to avoid the fate he has suffered as a “worm feast”…but that’s nonsense, since nothing Cross does is going to let him avoid mortality, and the message of A Christmas Carol isn’t “avoid death at all costs” in any case.)  And when/how does Frank Cross learn whatever it is he learns in the noise and mayhem of the events he experiences?  I’m still not sure.  That’s probably one of the most damning reviews I can give of an adaptation of A Christmas Carol: I don’t understand how this Scrooge has been transformed. 

I Know That Face:  Bobcat Goldthwait, who appears here in the astonishingly ill-conceived role of Eliot Loudermilk, plays the role of the Narrator in 2005’s A Halfway House Christmas, which from what I’m seeing online looks like an equally ill-conceived television program.  Alfre Woodard, an iconic performer who’s mostly wasted here in the part of Grace Cooley (the Bob Cratchit analogue), appears later in her career as Wanda Dean, a drug-addicted mother rescued at Christmastime by a drag queen, in 2000’s Holiday Heart.  It will be not at all surprising that Bill Murray (who in Scrooged is of course Frank Cross, the Scrooge-equivalent) appears as himself in the TV special, A Very Murray Christmas, but it might surprise you that the bartender in that program is a role played by David Johansen, who had appeared alongside Murray here as the Ghost of Christmas Past.  And John Houseman, who appears here in his final credited role as a thinly fictionalized version of himself, narrating the live Scrooge television broadcast that Frank Cross is trying to produce, had appeared as Ephraim Adams, the imperious old choirmaster, in 1980’s A Christmas Without Snow.  Houseman also plays a small role—Mr. Wabash, a CIA officer—in 1973’s Three Days of the Condor, a relatively taut thriller that happens to be set around the Christmas holidays (a la Die Hard) and will probably at some point make it onto this blog.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Present:  In fairness, we do get a very creepy undead Marley, and I think Yet to Come’s a good modern American version of the Spirit just in terms of character design.  The rest of the spirit work, as aforementioned, isn’t clicking for me, but I liked these elements and felt they captured something of the Dickens original.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent:  It’s surprising to me that nobody comes calling on Cross for donations, like the men who call on Scrooge in the original tale, and it is flat out weird that Marley isn’t burdened by chains or any other symbolism to communicate that he’s specifically suffering for his crimes against humanity.  Sure, Hayward mumbles something about how mankind should be his welfare, but it feels so tacked on to a scene that otherwise communicates nothing about the Hayward-Cross dynamic (as opposed to the depth of that Marley-Scrooge encounter) that I think the movie essentially whiffs on the dialogue itself.  Everything from the appearance in the film of Christmas Yet to Come through to the end credits is very different from the original story, and in a way that saps the story’s power, I think.

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Christmas Carol Vibes (6/10): Starting with the title, there’s no way you’ll be confused about this being an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and given that Frank Cross is trying to produce a much more faithful (in some respects) live version of the story at his TV studio, we do get images of traditional costumes, etc.  Spirits are taking him to the past, present and future, and he becomes sympathetic to the unwell child of his employee.  You know, the pieces are here.  But also, this really doesn’t capture the right tone of the story at far too many points.  If you’re in the mood for A Christmas Carol, I’m not sure this one will resolve a big chunk of that need.

Actual Quality (5/10): There’s a lot of money and talent on the screen here, and at the right moments (a fair proportion of the interactions between Frank and Claire, anytime Grace is center stage, etc.) I could see there was a movie I kind of wanted to watch.  And then everything else happens, and makes me feel foolish for coming back to this film more than once, trying to understand a motion picture that clearly doesn’t understand itself.  It’s an interesting effort in some ways, but it’s also a failed effort, without question.

Scrooge?  Murray’s register as an actor is great in the right roles, but when the writing lets him down, at least in the 1980s I just think he didn’t have the tools it would have taken to escape the problem of being obviously and exhaustingly self-satisfied on screen.  It undermines both sides of the Scrooge experience, in my opinion, even though I’ll admit he persuades me that he is a person other people hate and might love to see dead.  And especially when it’s time to be the reformed Frank Cross, he’s still leaning so hard into this smug, condescending persona that it undermines most of his lines of dialogue in a way that maybe another actor could have sold me on.

Supporting Cast?  I wish there was more for Claire to do, since Karen Allen’s got a lot more range than what’s asked of her, to be a largely trodden-upon do-gooder who in the final scene seems almost like a woman relieved that her abusive boyfriend has forgiven her (rather than a woman who rightly ought to be receiving his apology and weighing whether to forgive HIM).  The Spirits are badly written and directed—I don’t blame David Johansen or Carol Kane, even though I think it’s also true that really they’d be poorly cast as better written versions of the Spirits in most adaptations since their comedic energy is hostile and aggressive in ways that would be hard to calibrate when it comes to this story.  

Recommended Frequency?  I have tried so many times to like this film, given how many talented actors are in it, and given my feeling that there’s got to be a way to tell a good modern American version of the story.  It’s better than last year’s entry (Ghosts of Girlfriends Past), but that bar was ludicrously low, and frankly, I think I’m done trying to understand or appreciate this movie.  Despite its own self-satisfaction at its big swoopy emotional ending, I think the choices of the film-makers end up creating a work that’s almost as sour and bitter as Ebenezer Scrooge.  If they understood how to make a movie that celebrated human connection, compassion, and care, they applied very little of that understanding to huge sections of Scrooged.  An unfortunate miss, and one I won’t be coming back to again.

You might feel very differently, of course, which I respect, so how might you watch Scrooged?  Well, if you subscribe to some of the slightly less well-known streamers—Paramount+, AMC+, MGM+, for instance—you can stream it for free, and you can rent it streaming from all the usual places.  It’s quite inexpensive at Barnes and Noble on disc, and some 1,500 libraries have it for checkout, according to Worldcat, if you’d like to try it without paying (a wise option, in my opinion).  For those of you still waiting for a good, straightforward adaptation of A Christmas Carol, hey—watch this space.  Next Sunday, I should have something for you.