Ghosts of Girlfriends Past Reviewed on Blu-ray
By Bill Warren
"Ghosts of Girlfriends Past," as the title already suggests, a romantic comedy version of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol;" even though Dickens' name doesn't appear in the credits, the movie is boldly set at Christmas (though the holiday has nothing to do with the plot) and includes a scene straight out of Dickens' often-filmed classic (upon finally really awakening, our hero asks a boy beneath his window what day it is).
Here, instead of being a miserly aging skinflint, the protagonist is a relatively young, wealthy hedonistic fashion photographer, Connor Mead (Matthew McConaughey), who goes through girlfriends like other people use Kleenex. A scene near the end briefly features him facing all of them at once, and the double row of girlfriends disappears into the vanishing-point distance.
Mead is blithe, arrogantly confident, flattering, aloof and uncaring, a major jerk (though you're free to use a stronger word--the obvious one is used many times in the movie). He's happy, busy and cynical, a major user. Most men in the audience are likely to envy him; this is a "rom com" mostly for women, though I suspect most of them will be attracted to Connor. Most of those in the movie are.
Connor breaks up with three recent girlfriend on a conference call, utterly unconcerned by their surprise and hurt feelings. He disdains marriage, considers it an "archaic and obsolete institution," a trap for the foolish. Power in a relationship, he declares, lies with whoever cares less. But still heads off in the snowy countryside of what seems to be upstate New York to serve as best man at the wedding of his hero-worshipping younger brother Paul (Breckin Meyer).
The wedding is taking place at the home where the two orphaned brothers grew up in the care of their arrogant, lady-killer Uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas), who died an unspecified time earlier. It's a huge mansion, probably indicating that Connor and Paul don't have to worry about money (we never get a clue as to what Paul does). Connor surprises himself by being very glad to see Jenny Perotti (Jennifer Garner), who'd been his girl friend, then briefly girlfriend, when they were much younger; in fact, she gave him his first camera as a birthday present. He's clearly attracted to Jenny, who still has feelings for him, too. He surprises himself further by being jealous of a handsome wedding guest (Daniel Sunjata), who shows interest in Jenny.
In the men's room--yes, this mansion is so large it has actual restrooms, not merely bathrooms--Connor is surprised (but, oddly, not very) to encounter the ghost of Uncle Wayne's, who's taking a leak (telling us more about the lavatory habits of ghosts than we really needed to know). Uncle Wayne, still the womanizing playboy he was in life, tells Connor that this night, he will be visited by three ghosts, whose mission--as it is Uncle Wayne's--is to convince him to quit his lowdown ways.
Sure enough, along come the ghosts; just as in "A Christmas Carol," the first is the Ghost of Girlfriends Past, Allison (Emma Stone), the giddy teenager with whom Connor lost his virginity. They cruise through the past on Uncle Wayne's monogrammed bed, visiting a scant few of Connor's old lovers, one of whom, briefly, was Jenny. Then comes the Ghost of Girlfriends Present, Connor's assistant, who shows him what people think about him right now. Finally, the ethereal and silent Ghost of Girlfriends Yet to Come--but the sequence has nothing to do with girlfriends, but instead depicts Connor's lonely funeral.
The movie is just as rote and by-the-numbers as this description makes it sound; there are no surprises, no twists, and relatively little imagination, quite unlike "The Hangover," written by the same screenplay team, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. The problem and the premise are one and the same: it's based on the Dickens tale, and therefore has to plod through everything step by step. There's some clever writing here and there; the ghost of Connor's assistant tells him that, contrary to what he thought, she's not gay; she admits there was that one time in college, but "I went to Barnard; there was no choice." The dialogue, especially the utter-cad quips given to both Connor and Uncle Wayne, is reasonably good for a romantic comedy, and some of the performances, particularly those of Garner and Douglas, are intelligent and amusing.
But when at the beginning, Connor says "I am condemned to see the world as it actually is....Love is a myth," you know that line exists solely to be disproved; for, in fact, the person who makes that claim to realize how very wrong he was. We simply have to watch him learn it. Of course, the Dickens story has itself been filmed many, many times, including once in 2009, the same year as "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past." Audiences have little trouble sitting through another repeat of the story, because it's fun to see cranky old Scrooge wised up. But when a character tells Connor early on, "Deep down, you're a big softy," we have little reason to watch him uncover the softy within.
Part of the problem is Matthew McConaughey--he's not entirely convincing as a self-centered rake; it's too clearly a pretense, so we become impatient for him to learn better. On the other hand, the movie almost endorses the love-'em-and-leave-'em lifestyles of Connor and Uncle Wayne; there's an odd scene in the end credits showing that Uncle Wayne is completely unchanged, and happy about it. Douglas is great in the role, a major jerk who revels in his jerkiness. He's clearly having a time being the kind of guy most women hate (but want to screw anyway), and he's the liveliest thing about the movie. But leaving him unrepentant undercuts what's supposedly the message of the movie. Alec Baldwin's role in "My Best Friend's Girl" is extremely similar, almost interchangeable, but he has a few moments of heart-felt, wistful regret; he's had lots of sex, but not lots of joy. Not Douglas; he was a cad while living, and still a cad while dead. So what's wrong with Connor living the same way?
Although a romantic comedy with touches of fantasy wouldn't ordinarily seem to be a movie that would be boosted very much by Blu-ray's high definition--it doesn't improve "My Best Friend's Girl," for instance, though that's a better movie than this one--but being set at Christmas in this huge, burnished building/home/whatever, the high definition creates an almost tactile sense of luxury. Also, director Mark Waters ("The Spiderwick Chronicles;" "Mean Girls") shows a good eye for imaginative camerawork; there are two overhead shots looking straight down at the action which quickly advance the plot simply by what we see. In one case, Connor has to catch up with a car that's left the compound; looking straight down, we see his Cadillac convertible (Uncle Wayne's favorite car) cut across the landscape, zipping across the curving path of the downhill road. Not only is this a canny, well-considered shot, it's enhanced a lot by high definition, as the trees around the road, the cars themselves and the snowy landscape stand out in sharp relief, showing us that this is a smart but dangerous move on Connor's part, making it clear that he considers this maneuver one worth taking.
The soundtrack, though, has much the same routine nature as the movie itself, with little imagination shown anywhere until that downhill plunge in the Cadillac, which is scored with Elvis' dynamic "Burnin' Love." It snaps the movie to life.
The extras are nothing special, merely the usual sort of making-of featurettes, with one ("It's All About Connor") primarily friendly praise of McConaughey. The Blu-ray has a cardboard sleeve, and includes a second disc with the movie stored digitally, for uploading to whatever device you choose.
There's nothing offensive about "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past," and I suppose that sooner or later someone was going to do "A Christmas Carol" with a cad in need of regeneration. It's better than you might expect, but not as good as it should have been, an unfortunate thing to say about any movie.
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