Would Charles Dickens have written the movie Scrooge? No. Would he have written The Muppet Christmas Carol? Good lord no, and stab your eyes for even suggesting as such. Truth told, he probably would have written something like Scrooged, an 80s, greed-isn’t-good update of the Dickens classic. The wittiest satire of television since Network, Scrooged gives us Frank Cross, the “youngest president in the history of television,” a man who also happens to be the completely maniacal head of the IBC TV network. IBC’s holiday programming runs toward action flicks like The Night the Reindeer Died and cheesy variety shows like Bob Goulet’s Old-Fashioned Cajun Christmas. But Frank’s pièce de résistance is Scrooge, a live-from-around-the-world Christmas Eve special, featuring Buddy Hackett as the old skinflint, Mary Lou Retton as Tiny Tim, and a bevy of scantily clad, oh-so 80s Solid Gold Dancers.
“We’ll own Christmas,” Frank announces gleefully.
But will it own your heart? Hit the cut, true believers, to find out the answer to that question, along with why it’s the second of three traditional Christmas-time movies for me.
During the course of Scrooged, the TV executive experiences his own version of the events that haunted Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Cross is visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. He is shown how miserable he really is and how unhappy he has made everyone else. Christmas Past is a chain-smoking cab driver, Present, a violence-loving fairy, and Future? Well, he’s scary. Together, of course, they show him just what the 25th of December means: pain. OK, maybe it’s change, but trust me, there will be copious amounts of pain.
The Bob Cratchit figure of his story is his long-suffering secretary, Grace Cooley. Her son, the Tiny Tim figure, is old enough to speak, but has never opened his mouth. Cross gives the secretary a bath towel for Christmas, but when he is taken by a ghost to look in through the window of her household, he realizes how much happiness is missing from his life.
Meanwhile, there is trouble for Cross on the professional front. The chief executive officer of the network has lost confidence in him, and brought in a brash outsider to “lend a hand.” Cross fears that his job is threatened, especially since the CEO seems to have gone off the deep end. The fear of job loss and the lessons from the Christmas ghosts result in a moral transformation for Cross, and in the final scenes the repentant television executive barges onto the set of the live production of “Scrooge” and testifies to his change of heart.
Most people are put-off by the ending and claim that when the nastiness stops and sentiment kicks in the film goes downhill. I don’t necessarily feel this way. In a world where Christmas is commercialized and the time of year where people go in huge debt we need a constant reminder of what we should be feeling. No one is asking you to celebrate the fact that your local grocery store is selling cheap turkeys or that greedy stores have a limited stock of hideously overpriced hot ticket items. At the end Frank Cross, the world’s biggest scrooge and non-believer, tells us that it’s the fun, the determination to make a difference, the easiness of changing someone’s life and the spirit of the holiday season that actually matters. You don’t have to hate it and if you surrender your pride and just give it a go then maybe the miracle to happen to you too.
Bill Murray has always been able to exude a combination of smarminess, smugness, and demented charm, and it’s perfect for a 20th-century Scrooge. Like Murray’s best work, the comedy here is angry and in your face: The scene in which Frank becomes enraged to discover that his heart is defrosting is classic Murray, as is the change-of-heart breakdown, on national television, that turns into a deranged rant about spreading Christmas cheer. You get the impression that Frank will approach his new mission of loving his fellow humans with the same slightly frightening edge he brought to his Scrooginess.
As I said earlier, Dickens would approve.