Apparently Hollywood agrees with at least some of my criticisms of A Christmas Carol, because among the many variations on this done-to-death movie are two that (to my mind) significantly improve on its shortcomings. One is Ms. Scrooge, starring Cicely Tyson. The other is Scrooged, starring Bill Murray. Both have modern-day settings.
Aside from the novelty of a black, female Scrooge (Ebenita instead of Ebeneezer), Ms. Scrooge vastly improves on showing the title character's past and how she became what she is today. (It also avoids the foolish conceit of pretending all important events in her past took place on Christmas and simply shows her past in general). She begins as a poor black girl growing up in the South. Her father gives her a puppy for Christmas and she thinks she is the luckiest girl in the world. He is a veteran of WWII and hopes between his savings and a GI loan to start a gas station. Benita (short for Ebenita) innocently offers all her allowance she has been saving up. Thus we learn she was attached to money from a very young age, though not yet pathologically so. We see him boycotted, harassed and threatened by white neighbors who don't want a black man to succeed, and then Ebenita says, "No, spirit, don't make me see this." The spirit shows her the day her father's gas station was fire bombed and he was killed.
As soon as she is old enough Ebenita flees as far from the South as she can -- to Minneapolis in her case. She arrives flat broke with no family or friends in town, desperate for any job and walks into the clutches of Maude Marley. This is the only version of the story I have seen that really explores Scrooge's relationship with Marley. Its take is revealing. Marley is a predatory lender who squeezes the poor. At first she is going to turn Scrooge away, but Benita begs for a job and says she is good with money, why her father used to call her "stingy Bingy." That interests Marley. Besides, Marley sees how desperate Scrooge is an squeezes her as ruthlessly as she squeezes her clients. Scrooge hates her. And we get to see the old Scrooge watching her young self, remembering for the first time in years just how shabbily Marley treated her and just how much she hated her -- and now she has become just like her.
And we actually get to see Scrooge becoming like Marley over time. She squeezes the poor, at first because she has no choice if she wants a paycheck, but over time she starts putting more conviction in it. Marley notices, recognizes Scrooge might take her talents elsewhere, and starts giving her promotions. Scrooge starts liking her promotions, even if she still hates Marley. Her boyfriend begins to be concerned, doesn't like what she is becoming, asks her to marry him and move with him to Atlanta. And we see this really is the turning point in Scrooge's life when she gives up love for money, and when she chooses to be just like Marley.
The present and future are not significantly different than the original and add nothing to our insight. But actually seeing Scrooge become Scrooge and watching her relive the process, realize how much she once hated what she has become, and recognize what she has missed -- all this makes her conversion much more believable than Dickens' version.
Bill Murray's version focuses less on generosity to the poor than on putting one's loved ones and relationships ahead of money, but the story works reasonably well on that level. Bill Murray is a cold, hard-fisted TV executive put in charge of broadcasting a live version of A Christmas Carol. The live broadcast is wildly implausible, but is a necessary excuse why the studio can't cut him off when he interrupts the show at the end to give his maudlin lecture on the real meaning of Christmas. It does a much better job than the original of integrating past, present and future into one continuing stream.
For one thing, the present is not just something Scrooge goes on a tour of; it is something he is living right here and now. That is to some degree the case in the original; we have to see Scrooge in action to know what he is like, after all. But in Scrooged, the tours the spirits offer take up only part of our protagonist's time; in between he is busy with the business of everyday life. And we see a man who is hard-hearted and greedy, but not totally lost to human feeling. His younger brother is trying to stay in touch, but he is making that difficult. And Bill Murray himself looks up his old girlfriend Claire, who has not married someone else, and who now works at the homeless shelter, and finds that she still thinks of him as an old friend. So even without the intervention of the Spirits, Scrooge is not altogether dead to feeling; there are still two people who he loves.
In our tour of the past, we see his past with the two. We see his childhood, how he protected his younger brother from their tyrannical father, how his brother called him, "the best brother a kid ever had." We see how he met Claire, how they met, how they were happy together for a time, and how he lost her, as well as that she is still fond of him. We see that in the present, he is really poised on a knife's edge. What he does may determine whether he and his brother drift apart altogether, and whether he can get back with Claire. And in the future -- well, we see Dickens' old routine about dying alone and unmourned. And we see him drifting apart from the people he still loves. But we also see something worse, and the more powerful because it is unexpected. We see that Scrooge's worst fate isn't losing Claire -- it's corrupting her and making her as cold and uncaring as he is. Now there's a horror that he is truly ready to go to any length to prevent. And seeing his reformation come from the fear of losing -- or worse, corrupting -- the two people he still loves gives it a continuity or character, and a plausibility utterly lacking in the original.
When we get close to the end of January, I will have to do a post on Groundhog Day as A Christmas Carol done right.
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