In 1843, Charles Dickens published a little novella called A Christmas Carol, concerning the fun-hating miser Ebenezer Scrooge seeing the error of his ways after being visited by three spirits on the night of one fateful Christmas Eve. Although Dickens could never have known it back then, his classic holiday novella’s status in the public domain would one day give Hollywood the gift that keeps on giving. There have been over a hundred screen adaptations of Dickens’ holiday classic, from The Muppets Christmas Carol (1992) to Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol (2009) which starred Jim Carrey as creepy 3D animated motion capture Scrooge.
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For every faithful Christmas Carol adaptation, there are even more attempts to modernize the classic tale, with varied results. Richard Donner’s Scrooged (1988) starred Bill Murray as a TV network president who forces his staff to work over the holidays. The made-for-TV Hallmark movie Ms. Scrooge (1997) starred Cicely Tsyon as an elderly woman of color, “Ms. Ebenita Scrooge,” in a role which sounds like a Tyler Perry spoof.
A great many of these Christmas Carol adaptations are hard to sit through. And some are so bad that they beg the question of whether the classic novella’s status in the public domain is actually a good thing. Yet, none of the other Christmas Carol adaptations hold a flickering candle to the Matthew McConaughey romantic comedy Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009).
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past Is a Sexist Reimagining of A Christmas Carol
Warner Bros. Pictures
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is a loose adaptation of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Upon its release most critics dismissed Ghosts of Girlfriends Past as a cheap Dickens knockoff. But some took offense to the film’s blatant misogyny, which, surprisingly, was not something that screenwriters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore took from their 19th century source material.
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past substituted Dickens’ Christmastime setting with a contemporary wedding, swapping Christmas Eve and Christmas Day out with the day before and the day of Meade’s brother’s wedding. Yet, the film takes place in a snowy castle in New England whose interior walls look as though they’ve been stripped of any decorations that might be perceived as Christmasy. The resulting setting is not exactly a far cry from the snowy London streets of A Christmas Carol. And with Robert Forster’s supporting role as Sergeant Volkom looking uncannily like The General character in White Christmas (1954), Ghosts of Girlfriends Past cannot escape the shadow of Christmas.
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past Rips Off the Dickens Plot
Aside from removing Christmas, screenwriters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore kept the spine of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol largely intact. The film’s protagonist Connor Meade (McConaughey), functions as a sexist reimagining of Ebenezer Scrooge. Meade is a famous photographer and serial womanizer described by other characters in the script as, “The Great Connor Meade,” and, “the biggest jerk ever. In fact, [he’s] even famous for it.” That is actual dialogue from the film.
The film’s plot is built around Connor Meade (McConaughey) being visited by three ghosts on the night before his brother’s wedding. The first of the three is the titular “Ghost of Girlfriends Past” (played by Emma Stone). Stone gives the part her all. But playing a 1980s teenager with a head full of hairspray and mouth full of braces, there’s really nothing she can do to make the character any less annoying. It’s the kind of early career role that Stone would never agree to play again.
Michael Douglas Based His Character On a Real-Life Hollywood Producer
Michael Douglas graces the film with its best performance by a long shot as the late “Uncle Wayne,” a version of Dickens’ Marley character in A Christmas Carol who returns from the grave to warn Scrooge to stop living a life of greed like he did. In Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, it is Uncle Wayne (Douglas) who returns as a ghost to warn Meade (McConaughey) to stop living the life of a male chauvinist pig as he had.
Plot functions aside, Douglas’ character has less in common with Marley from the fictional source novella and more in common with real-life legendary Hollywood producer and studio executive, Robert Evans. In the 1960s, Paramount Pictures was on the decline. But once Evans took over as the head of the studio, he brought Paramount back to its former glory with a string of financially and critically successful films like Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Love Story (1970), The Godfather (1972), and Chinatown (1974).
Evans was also an infamous womanizer, and this is the primary characteristic which Douglas draws from for his portrayal of Uncle Wayne in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.
Critics Were Offended By Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
While Girlfriends Past scraped by with a decent return at the box office, critics took offense to the patently misogynistic diatribes from McConaughey and Douglas’ characters. In his review of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert said:
It wasn’t just what the male characters said about the female characters that critics found offensive. They were equally offended by the film’s portrayal of its female characters as shrews for the taming and sluts for the taking and everything in between.
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past Depicts Women With Degrading Stereotypes
If Lucas and Moore were inclined to defend the sexism in their screenplay, then that defense would likely argue that Ghosts of Girlfriends Past “deals” with sexism without actually being sexist. Why should the film itself be held accountable for the beliefs of its protagonist? Especially since McConaughey’s character learns the error of his ways in the end, and that everything Douglas’ character ever taught him about treating women like a slab of meat was actually a bad thing.
This argument might be convincing if not for the portrayal of the female characters in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, who run the gamut of degrading stereotypes against women. There’s the shrieking windbag Sandra (played by Lacey Chabert), sex objects like Denice the Bridesmaid (Amanda Walsh), annoying little girls like the Ghost of Girlfriends Past (Stone), the sexy divorcee who is flattered by her boobs being grabbed without her consent like Vonda Volkom (Anne Archer), and, last but not least, Jenny Perotti (Garner) the “one of the guys” brunette who can’t help but be attracted to male chauvinist pigs. It’s almost impressive how many stereotypes the filmmakers were able to cram into a two-hour film.
The Joke at the End of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past Is the Last Straw
The final scene in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past doesn’t just stop at crossing the gender line. At the very end of the film, McConaughey and Garner dance together in the snow to REO Speedwagon’s Keep On Loving You while the camera floats away until they are small figures dancing outside the beautiful New England castle. If ever there was a signal to the audience that the end credits are about to roll, this final crane shot is it. But the credits don’t come just yet.
Instead, director Mark Waters cuts back inside the castle to Uncle Wayne, who is haunting the female ghosts with his signature “gift” with “the dames,” as he calls it. After the Ghosts of Girlfriends Future and Present shoot down Wayne’s sexual advances in the form of a leering old Michael Douglas, he takes a shot at Emma Stone’s underage ghost girl.
If this was some throw-away line, then Waters would have let it play in a small square beside the end credits as he did with the rest of the B-roll, featuring side characters dancing and joking around during the wedding. Instead, Waters intentionally cut away from his big crane shot of the lead characters dancing romantically in the snow. And for what? To throw in a cheap pedophile joke?
Douglas: “Looks like it’s just you and me sweetie. Oh, I love those scrunchies.”
Stone: “Ew, I’m like sixteen.”
Douglas: “We’re ghosts, baby. We’re ageless.”
This pedophile joke is the last straw from a film filled with crass humor that doesn’t just insult half the audience along the gender line. No, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past insults the entire audience’s intelligence.
