THE MOVIES OF MY LIFE PHASE ONE: SCROOGED (1988)

I supposed I shouldn't have been surprised that this was the film y'all chose for me to watch to honor the passing of the great Michael J. Pollard.  After all, it is Christmas time, and this was arguably the biggest title of the four I posted on the poll.  I think it also has a rep as being something of a modern Yuletide classic alongside A Christmas Story.

I saw this during the film's initial run at a theater on Long Island, and haven't watched it since.  Revisiting it after over thirty years, I am now really worried.

I'm beginning to worry that, unlike the others of my generation, I've allowed my sense of humor to wander into a territory where it doesn't find the things funny it thought was funny back in the 80's.

I think I don't have to go too much into the plot; one of the reasons Dicken's A Christmas Carol is such an evergreen is because it's easily 'reskinned' to adapt to whatever time frame/style/milieu the adapter wants it to be.  In this case, our Scrooge is Frank Cross (Bill Murray), the president of a television network who is spearheading an...ambitious Christmas Eve night of programming.  The crown jewel of this night is a live broadcast of a...liberal adaptation of the Dickens classic, called Scrooge and featuring Buddy Hackett, the Solid Gold Dancers and Mary Lou Retton.  However, on this Christmas Eve he is visited by his old boss (John Forsythe) who has arranged for three ghosts to visit him in the hopes of getting Frank to change his bah-humbugging ways...and maybe reunite him with the estranged love of his life, Claire (a luminous Karen Allen).  Cue the modernized window dressing!

Apparently the script for this film had existed for two years prior to being made and was extensively rewritten by Murray, Mitch Glazer and the great Michael O'Donoghue.  For those of you who don't know who O'Donoghue was, he was a National Lampoon alum responsible for some of the most delightfully vicious stuff on the earliest seasons of Saturday Night Live.  The best moments during this rewatch--the moments where I felt the sense of fun I felt in that movie theater in Long Island--were the ones where I could see O'Donoghue's black-as-pitch cynicism poking through like a compound fracture.  When those moments meld with the admittedly great special effects, it is magic.  I would like to have seen the Scrooged where Donoghue and Glazer was given free reign, as I suspect that is the movie that lived in my mind for the last three decades....

...but those moments are submerged by the insistence that Dis Be A Holiday Movie, Damnit, and that other impulse hobbles the film.  Supposedly Murray and Donner was at loggerheads throughout production, and I can almost see it.  It is obvious that Donner won many of the fights, judging from the way the treacle seeps through.  It's also obvious by the way Murray is kind of walking his way through most of this (Don't blame your four year sabbatical, Bill; I know when you're not trying).  I got no sense of Frank being a being that lives and breathes outside of this movie--this is him doing what he thinks the director wants him to do.  And this sort of lazy acting permeates a lot of the characters, to the point where Bobcat Goldthwaite's Loudermilk is based pretty much entirely on his stand-up persona.   And there is so much run time taken up by stuff like the obvious Tiny Tim analog and his mother (played by a young Alfre Woodard) or the going ons at Claire's outreach center that keeps reminding us this is ultimately supposed to be a sentimental thing.  Sometimes those sequences go a little too far, like when Frank is transported by Carol Kane’s Ghost of Christmas Present (whose sadism I did not find funny, even in 1989) to see the corpse of Pollard’s Herman; it’s at those points where the puppet strings being pulled is right out there in the open.  Donner keeps pulling us toward that final moment where everyone is singing ‘Put A Little Love In Your Heart,' and no amount of cynicism is going to stop him.

So, yeah...I did not get on with this film as I thought I was going to, and I think it’s because I have become a different person with age.  I wonder if this is a film that can hit a viewer as hilarious at the right age and I’m not that viewer any more.  I’m loathe to recommend or not recommend this as I suspect I am not the audience anymore and I don’t want to seem to be throwing shade at the people who are in that audience. So I’ll just say...not for me.

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