Scrooged

Richard Donner directed this, and it shows in every frame--the picture has a wonderful visual clarity. That's one thing I like about Donner: he doesn't screw around with fog (literal or figurative), he takes full advantage of the technical capacity of the medium. Everything here shines with a sort of hyperacute radiance, even the garbage. Unfortunately, this may be the best part of the picture. Oh, it's not a terrible picture or anything, or even a total failure; indeed, there are very good elements. But it could have been so much more. The greatest strength of the picture (which, in case you don't know or haven't figured out, is a retelling of Dickens' “A Christmas Carol”) is its source story, which is so great that it would seem almost impossible to make a bad movie based on it. The fatal flaw here (and after long deliberation I finally figured it out) is that the picture tries simultaneously to update the classic and parody it. Well, you can't have it both ways, or you wind up with a mishmosh whose intentions are never clear. And this is a shame because updating the story is a great idea, and choosing Bill Murray (whom I still find hilarious) to play the Scrooge part is inspired casting, with his shifty eyes and slightly sleazy manner, not to mention his gift for timing and the bon mot.

Even the setting is perfect, a TV network, with Murray at the helm: the meanest TV executive around. But what should have been the keystone of the picture--Murray's performance--is the weak link. His usual glib sparkle and spontaneity is absent (except for a very few moments). He seems compressed into the role, as if he were trying to obey a set of rules he had been given, but which he was none too happy about. And I suspect that that may actually be the case. The movie struggles to be raffish, but not too raffish, to be naughty, but not too naughty. Remember, this is supposed to be holiday time family viewing. Much the same way, Murray has to be mean, but not too mean, hateful, but not too hateful, risqué, but not too risqué, so that he seems like a performer battling to get out of a cage, and his natural insouciance is just squished out of him. I guess an “R” rating would have been the death knell to this picture, and the producers would do anything to avoid it, including giving Murray Quaaludes. Too bad.

One small benefit is that you do catch glimpses of the talented serious performer that Murray can be (though I never saw “The Razor’s Edge”), but this is small consolation, coming as it does buried in a swampy morass of good-time holiday platitudinousness. They turn Murray loose at the end (a little) as if to say "save this picture with your energy") and he may actually be ad-libbing a bit, but it is too little too late. The nice stuff comes through all right... who could resist a tear when the reformed Bill gets the mute little boy (the Tiny Tim of the picture) to speak at the end in front of an adoring TV crowd of millions? And that's all well and good, but not worth the price of having to endure a pallid and flat Murray throughout most of the picture. The misguided thinking can be seen early on when it is seen that Bill is NOT the most powerful person at the studio (he has to kowtow to the chairman). I guess this was to make him open to a little sympathy. But the whole point of Scrooge was that he goes from totally unsympathetic to being human, and here they give themselves an unfair head start. The same problem applies to the vision of Christmas future, which is scary, but not nearly scary enough or long enough to transform Bill the way he is supposed to be. More caution I guess.

The picture is not utterly without value: other performances (including Karen Allen as Bill's love) are quite good (though some are overly bombastic), the photography, as mentioned, and of course the warmth and good feelings expressed (however woodenly) at the end. But the ultimate result of all this calculation is that some of the big moments fall short, while the little touches shine... the shaky way Bill's hand pours screechingly small amounts of Coke into his rum, and some of the throwaway lines ("Back off, big man. That may work with the chicks but not with me.”) are vintage Murray--in distressingly short supply here--but in the old days he would have said it to Death (here he thinks it's just an actor in costume). (Though the follow up line "Did our people do that?” is OK.) See, in the old days, Murray's strength was his absolute refusal to be fazed by anything (i.e. “Ghostbusters”). Here he is fazed by everything. But then, fazing Scrooge was what “A Christmas Carol” was all about and is. So perhaps, under the circumstances, and bearing that in mind, we will just sit back, enjoy the photography and what laughs come, and bask in the warm glow of Hollywood's version of Peace on Earth and Goodwill towards men. God knows there's little enough of it these days in the real world, and, in the holiday season, it seems to be a compromise we can live with.