Christmas Week: Scrooged (1988)

2 years ago

Christmas Week: Scrooged (1988)

IN PRAISE OF FRANK CROSS

by Christopher Cantwell

Acid rain. Drug addiction. International terrorism. Freeway killers. Now, more than ever, it is important to remember the true meaning of Christmas.

I have a bone to pick with Scrooged. The movie pretty much came and went in 1988, but because of its seasonal connection reappears every year on cable. This is not a bad thing. The film is exceptionally fun. That is, until Bill Murray becomes a nice guy.

Scrooged troubles me. The film is scary, and dark. But that’s not what troubles me. It troubles me that I’m so in love with Frank Cross. Let me be clear, however; I am not in love with the happy, dopey Frank Cross who appears at the end of the movie. I am in love with the awe-inspiring asshole Francis Xavier Cross from the beginning of the film, the Frank Cross that bashes his way through the entire movie until he’s converted in a last minute come-to-Jesus that takes place during a live cremation scene, a scene which still scares the crap out of me.

Now, one can argue that a true telling of this Dickens tale needs to be scary and dark in order to work—Ebenezer must truly face the horrors of what may come should he continue in his ways. Scrooged has no lack of horrors. Up until I saw this movie, the only Christmas Carol I’d seen was Mickey’s Christmas Carol, which is very different. Goofy, in the Jacob Marley role, does not hold Uncle Scrooge out of a skyscraper window by the neck. Uncle Scrooge does not pull the rotting flesh off of Goofy’s arm in a desperate attempt to live just as the bone gives way like wet wood and sends the poor duck plummeting to his death. But we get this gruesome sequence in Scrooged when Frank Cross confronts the corpse of his old boss Lew Hayward. Oh, and did I mention there’s a mouse in Lew’s skull?

The movie is chock full of frightening imagery. An eyeball in a cocktail. A flaming waiter. A frozen body. Foreboding creatures trapped in a ghost’s ribcage. Futuristic psych wards with crooked floors. Carol Kane. These trappings have enough ingredients to scare Frank Cross into being a nicer, better person. But in the end, Scrooged is different from other Christmas Carol retellings, because even the scary parts are funny. And the movie is never funnier than when Frank Cross is at his meanest.

The movie has a caustic wit. The script was penned by Mitch Glazer and Michael O’Donoghue, the latter of whom worked as the first head writer of SNL. It’s rumored O’Donoghue based Frank Cross on his old boss Fred Silverman, former network president of NBC. Maybe this is why Frank Cross is so enjoyable to watch. Shouting. Sending towels as holiday gifts. Burping. Tearing apart children’s Christmas drawings.

But he becomes less fun to watch the more his heart thaws. This is where Scrooged fails as a Scrooge story, even if it succeeds on nearly every other level. I like watching Frank Cross more at the beginning than I do at the end. I want him to go back to being a jerk again. It’s more fun.

It’s my best guess that the way Scrooged flatlines into a cast sing-a-long can only be the fault of bad rewrites. The gold of the movie likely comes from remnants of O’Donoghue and Glazer’s script, as well as Bill Murray’s manically mean comic performance (the movie is neutrally directed by Richard Donner as if he is neatly packing an expensive suitcase). Murray’s Frank Cross comes off as more intelligent and complex than everyone around him: Robert Mitchum’s eccentric yet moronic network mogul, Bobcat Goldthwait’s pathetic studio exec, John Glover’s LA scumbag, Alfre Woodard’s down-on-her-luck secretary, Karen Allen’s blithe do-gooder ex-girlfriend. Granted, these character performances are almost as much fun to quote as Frank Cross. Well, mostly just Glover as Brice Cummings—“I’m gonna dine out on this for months.”

Of course Frank is a bastard. He’s a bastard because everybody else seems fairly dumb: from the TV crew, to the network censor, to the homeless people who think he’s Richard Burton. No wonder Frank has a sign in his office that reads “Cross (n.) – a thing you nail people to.” No wonder he’s elated when his TV ad gives an old woman a heart attack.

Yes, Frank’s way is the wrong way to live one’s life. This is why we laugh when Frank goes haywire, suffers a few spectacular falls, and gets his ass kicked by a fairy. But I still don’t want Frank to change. His brother, the one who loves Christmas, is a total dope (ironically, he’s portrayed by Bill Murray’s actual brother, John Murray).

For me, the saddest part of the movie is when Frank interrupts the live TV broadcast at the end. It’s ten, maybe fifteen minutes of Bill Murray riffing desperately as the movie sinks into an egg nog coma. I understand Frank Cross destroying the TV special that he’s sold his very soul to produce. What I don’t understand is how the movie makes this look like a great career move. Frank’s stunt somehow gets his boss to dance with his wife in the living room of their mansion. No.

By the last scene, Frank has joined the land of the dopes. He’s happier, maybe, but to me, he’s missing something. The final shot we see in the film is Frank’s dopey brother James, watching him on television. “My brother, the king of Christmas!” James says.

Eh. It’s at this point that I rewind the film, just watch Frank shout “THAT ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH!”