“There are people that are having trouble making their miracle happen. There are people that don’t have enough to eat, people that are cold. You can go out and say hello to these people. You can take an old blanket out of the closet and say ‘Here!’ You can make them a sandwich and say ‘Oh, by the way – here!’”
Christmas movies are based on a lie, even the good ones. Setting aside the season-devouring phenomenon that are the Lifetime and Hallmark holiday flicks (some 65 this year alone), the entire Christmas movie genre presupposes that there is a special magic to the day designated December 25th. Overtly religious messaging aside, holiday movies put forth a world where everyone is swept up in an inevitable annual tide of regret, rumination and, ultimately, redemption, the powerful mojo of the season bonking us on the head until we remember what’s truly important. (That being family, charity, forgiveness and the fuzzy erasure of legitimate problems in a warm wash of sentiment, preferably with “Silent Night” wafting along with the falling snow.)
“Bah, humbug.”
No, that’s not me, pooh-poohing all that goodwill and peace on Earth and the rest. That’s Ebenezer Scrooge, fictional poster boy for us crabby, old jerks who resist all that Christmas spirit until we’re forcibly wrenched from our cold beds by the vengeful embodiment of said spirit, forced to witness horrors supposedly wrought by our selfishness, and finally plopped back down to spread the good word like the shell-shocked former hostage we’ve become.
Charles Dickens created Scrooge in the novella “A Christmas Carol” in 1843, and the story so captures the mood of enforced kindness surrounding the holiday season that there have been countless movie and TV versions of the timeless tale. There have been animated Scrooges, singing Scrooges, Scrooges with Muppets. Actors from Albert Finney to Michael Caine to Mister Magoo have all run the ghosts’ gauntlet. Everyone has a favorite iteration to watch around this time of year. (Sadly, Patrick Stewart isn’t doing his live one-person performance of the whole thing onstage, but you can watch his 1999 performance as Scrooge in a creditable TV version.)
But let’s talk about one of the most popular – and most tellingly terrible – “Christmas Carol” adaptations of all, Richard Donner’s 1988 updated Scrooge story, “Scrooged.” “Scrooged” is a mess, the director’s complete tone-deafness with regards to comedy turning this NYC-set version (with Scrooge’s miser transformed into Frank Cross, heartless TV network president) into a halting train wreck of comic tones, terrible continuity (watch how the name of the charity Karen Allen works at changes between scenes), and tonal whiplash. Even the makeup is godawful. It’s a sour, cynical, atonal clash of message and execution that wears its smirking manipulativeness like a shiny Christmas crown.
And I sort of love it.
“Scrooged” is a showcase for Bill Murray to do his wise-crackin’ thing. Shutterstock
Naturally, that’s mainly because of star Bill Murray, right at the height of his reign as the comedy star who could make a smirky one-liner sing like a particularly snarky angel. Murray had taken time off after the smash success of “Ghostbusters” and the followup financial and personal disappointment of the Murray-penned passion project “The River’s Edge,” before roaring back for this big budget ($32 million) comedy adaptation of the venerable holiday story. As the self- and ratings-obsessed Cross, Murray is all slick suits and zippy put-downs, his unquestioned king of television even forcing the entire network to pull all-nighters for a live Christmas Eve broadcast of “A Christmas Carol,” featuring pandering product placement, Buddy Hackett and the Solid Gold Dancers.
Murray was enticed back to the big screen by a script written by a couple of old friends from his “Saturday Night Live” days, Mitch Glazer and Michael O’Donoghue. Now, anyone in the know knows that putting Michael O’Donoghue in charge of a big studio holiday tentpole about the true meaning of Christmas is a giant red flag. O’Donoghue, known throughout his tumultuous career as Mr. Mike, was the dark prince of comedy, his time at the National Lampoon and “SNL” seeing the writer pen scathingly weird and pitch-dark ideas like “Mr. Mike’s Least-Loved Bedtime Tales,” where the shades-sporting O’Donoghue told horrific versions of beloved children’s tales. (Br’er Rabbit does not escape that briar patch – at all.) Murray imagined that his subversive pals would come up with a contemporary take on Scrooge more in line with Murray’s persona as the ultimate wise-ass.
He wasn’t wrong, with the driven Cross’ ruthless careerism allowing the former TV writers to skewer the television biz all while giving Murray plenty of room to creatively abuse everyone around him, from his downtrodden, Bob Cratchit-like assistant (Alfre Woodard), to a good-hearted underling (Bobcat Goldthwait), to even Karen Allen’s Claire, his one true love, whom Cross has abandoned in favor of becoming a master of the TV universe. He gets the requisite three ghostly visits (Carol Kane’s knuckle-dusting, fairy-like Ghost of Christmas Present is a complete hoot) before returning to his old life, where the newly reborn Frank interrupts the worldwide broadcast that was to be his crowning achievement to deliver the film’s ultimate message, as quoted in part above.
For the resolutely un-sentimental O’Donoghue, that sappy denouement was the stumbling block – Mr. Mike didn’t have a Christmassy bone in his body. Ultimately, he and Glazer settled on the one Christmas miracle they could stomach – that New Yorkers, for one night a year at least, are actually sort of nice to each other. For the big scene, however, the unsatisfied Murray went off-script, delivering a rambling, semi-improvised monologue as the alternately quippy and tearful Cross ranges all over the studio’s lavish sets (you can see Donner’s cameras lurching to keep up). Donner loved it while the aghast O’Donoghue thought Murray was having a nervous breakdown. (Donner reportedly punched Mr. Mike in the arm hard enough to raise bruises when the writer objected.) The take stayed.
And it sort of makes the movie. It is, undoubtedly, a mess, a self-indulgent, sloppy, atonal showcase for Murray to do his thing. But Bill Murray is Bill Murray, and even with the actor’s flip coolness intact (he gleefully makes out with one of those dancers under some convenient mistletoe), Murray finds the ragged truth in Mr. Mike’s grudging tribute to humanity’s capacity for even temporary decency. That, “Oh, by the way – here!,” as Murray’s Cross pantomimes the simple act of giving someone cold and homeless a scrap of comfort is as powerful an encapsulation of all the accumulated Christmas movie spirit as there is. Murray makes Cross’ realization feel grounded and laceratingly self-aware in a way that (although he’d never admit it) Mr. Mike could be proud of.
Christmas is just a day. People are in need all 365, and our self-congratulatory holiday sentimental gestures are belied by our unwillingness to extend that charity throughout our lives. And yet. If this season, for all its manufactured uplift, commercialism and mandatory togetherness, can inspire us to be just a little better than we thought we could be, then there’s something worthwhile in all of it.
As Murray, in his stumbling version of the words of the evil Mr. Mike puts it at the conclusion of his tirade: “If you believe in this spirit thing, the miracle will happen and then you’ll want it to happen again tomorrow. You won’t be one of these bastards who says, ‘Christmas is once a year and it’s a fraud.’ It’s not!”
It’s not.
“Scrooged” is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
Dennis Perkins is a freelance writer who lives in Auburn with his wife and cat.
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