Maybe it’s that Hallmark’s Christmas movies all follow in the footsteps of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, there isn’t much that separates the core themes of Scrooged from any number of Hallmark movies. Let’s consider the core plot: a corporate executive has exchanged love and family for cynicism and a workaholic mentality, and must be taught the values of basic humanity through some miracle of sorts. In many of the Hallmark movies, that miracle is usually delivered by a magical Santa Claus or William Shatner (or, really any number of celebrity cameos). In A Christmas Carol, the miracle is delivered by a team of ghosts. By the end, the cranky protagonist has been bullied into prioritizing family and community values over capitalist concerns, even if they never completely dismiss the value of money and profits.
Richard Donner’s Scrooged modernized the formula for a cynical 1980’s audience raised on sarcasm and disillusionment. By putting Bill Murray and his easy smarm in the lead role, Donner pastes over the audience’s knee-jerk revulsion to classical values. In the opening scene, Bill Murray’s television executive Frank “Lumpy” Cross criticizes a stilted promo for their live production of Scrooge showing an old man reading A Christmas Carol while vaunting their celebrity cameos; his version is a montage of 80’s deathly fears du jour (acid rain, drive by shootings, etc) promoting Scrooge as the cure to all of society’s ills. Regardless of the sheen placed over the Dickens story, it will still be the same core story with the same core messages.
As the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future show Lumpy various visions throughout America’s eras, Donner is promoting lower class suburban values over New York’s high speed amoral corporate values. Those families who don’t have money have togetherness, creating a happier community than a paranoid angry workaholic. In Scrooged, the happy unit is represented by two separate people: Frank’s brother James Cross (John Murray) and Frank’s secretary Grace Cooley (Alfre Woodard). James lives in a run down apartment with unpainted doors and missing wall sections, but still has small groups of friends over for Christmas Eve trivia games. Grace is a single working mother of five whose husband was murdered in front of her smallest son. She’s also Scrooged‘s primary representation of color.
Perhaps its the little touches that keep Scrooged from falling into a pit of monoculturalism. Grace is a warm-hearted hard worker who suffers at the hands of the Frank Cross’ tight-fistedness. Donner puts a poster by Keith Haring in her kitchen proclaiming “Free South Africa” (a message which pops up again on the control boards in the booth at the end of the movie). The Grim Reaper-esque Ghost of Christmas Future has a moment inspired by the 1940’s experimental short film, Meshes of the Afternoon (see also: Janelle Monae’s Tightrope because we should always watch it from time to time). And, the Ghost of Christmas Present is gender flipped to a delightfully punchy Carol Kane.
It might also be the mean-spiritedness that separates Scrooged from the Hallmark movies. Roger Ebert gave Scrooged 1 star, saying “there is little comic about it, and indeed the movie’s overriding emotions seem to be pain and anger.” Bill Murray and Richard Donner mix and mesh black comedy with horror and pathos in a roller coaster of emotional mish-mashing. Drugs, sex, waiters are set on fire, Bobcat Goldthwaite going postal with a shotgun…I’ve never heard of such A Christmas Carol. It’s almost as if they’re playing for keeps until the brazen and bizarre finale that breaks the fourth wall for the in-movie television audience and then for the actual theatrical audience.
Whatever it is, Scrooged was a modest success in theaters but became a larger hit for certain families (namely mine). Though its a somewhat sadistic adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic, it never mocks it. For its strange cynicism, it’s surprisingly faithful to the themes Dickens was promoting: a message denouncing the widening inequality and empathy gap between executives and workers (a timely message for the Wall Street-obsessed 80s that has only become more fantastical in the ensuing years), and empathy for a variety of people at the same time.
Scrooged currently streams on Netflix