Scrooged!
CINEMA
Bill Murray as Frank Cross and Carol Kane as the Ghost of Christmas Present in “Scrooged!,” Paramount Pictures, 1988.
Heart triumphs over cynicism in holiday classic
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hat is the secret to making a classic Christmas movie? I imagine if we knew that, there’d be far less cheesy Lifetime and Hallmark Channel retreads during the month of December. However, based on the films I find myself returning to year after year, I think I’m brave enough (or foolish enough depending on your perspective) to posit a theory. To me, the best Christmas movies are those which depict the holiday season as a whirlwind of conflicting, oxymoronic sentiments. Yes, Christmas is a time filled with love and happiness, but those feelings are constantly counterbalanced with a barrage
of cynicism and melancholy. That’s certainly the main conflict in “Scrooged,” the 1988 update of “A Christmas Carol”. Charles Dickens’s tale has been adapted hundreds of times, but the Bill Murray version is the only one that has ever truly worked for me. In others, it seems like the Ebenezer Scrooge figure only has a change of heart at the end because he’s supposed to. In Richard Donner’s version (with a
JOSH SEWELL
delightfully dark screenplay by Mitch Glazer and Michael O’Donoghue), Murray sells that transformation with a frenetic, poignant monologue that always brings tears to my eyes – no matter many times I watch it. That’s because the enthusiastic, revitalized Frank Cross who delivers that speech is a much different man than viewers have gotten to know over the previous 90 minutes. That old guy was a nasty television executive who represented the pinnacle of ’80s excess, and he clearly relished being a rotten person. But that’s what makes the final moments so emotional. Over the course West Georgia Living November/December 2017 9