Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

I just love those four-dollar early weekend matinees at the AMC in Tyngsboro. On Sunday morning I was back for another one. Even though I had a backlog of releases from previous weeks, I was in the mood for a comedy, so I decided to see Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, which had just come out two days before.

In my write-up of 17 Again, I mentioned that "naturalistic cover" was one of the hallmarks of Classical cinema. The Scrooge story (that is, adaptations of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol") is prime example of this. Such adaptations were popular in the Classical era, but the stories were always such that everything that happened to Scrooge, although psychologically powerful as a transformative experience, could be explained as a hallucination or a dream.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past takes the Scrooge story to new ground. Instead of a Christmas-themed story about a greedy miser who discovers the nature of charity and generosity, it is a wedding-themed story about a serial seducer, Conor Mead (Matthew McConaughey), who discovers the true nature of romantic love.

It was written by Scott Moore and John Lucas, who wrote last year's abysmal Four Christmases, but the result in this case was quite different. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past works very well, and in my book comes in as the strongest romantic comedy so far this year.

Naturalistic cover is completely upheld, as it should be for a Scrooge adaptation. Everything that happens to Conor (his visitations by ghosts) can be counted as a drunken hallucination, yet one that is powerful enough to change him over the course of one night.

One reason this movie works so well is impeccable casting. McConaughey is absolutely the perfect choice for Mead. Likewise Michael Douglas is delightful in a supporting role as the ghost of Conor's deceased uncle upon whose life Conor has based his own. Jennifer Connolly Garner is also the perfect choice for Conor's long-time long interest, whom he must win back in the course of the story, after discovering the true nature of love.

The mapping of money-to-love in the theme is handled very well. In Conor's past, we learn why he went from being a sweet-hearted young man to a closed-hearted seducer. There is more than a little reference to the contemporary seduction community (itself a trend in current Hollywood movies), in which many of the most diligent students are men who were previously completely inept at talking to women and had their hearts broken repeatedly.

Watching this movie was a rare experience for me, in that it was so fun to watch that I completely lost track of the time, never once checking my watch during the showing. I probably could have sat through it again, right afterwards. But it was past noon. It would have cost me six-fifty by then.