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Upon seeing Harold Ramis for the first time in 15 years, Bill Murray realizes that Ramis may have indeed metamorphosed into the real Santa Claus.

For most of his career, Bill Murray has had two modes: adorable buffoon and likable asshole. From Carl Spackler, the gophercidal greenskeeper, to Wally, the man who knew too little; and from Hunter Thompson to Don Johnston, Murray has cultivated a flexible but recognizable persona that can be dangerous, funny, sad, whimsical, or befuddled.  Above all, though, it is aloof, and he is usually shown at his best when he is treating people like garbage or too deluded to recognize the harm he could be bringing upon them.  His aloofness seems to be informed by an inaccessible and deep sadness, but even though his mercurial, mischievous puppy eyes now more closely resemble those of a weary hound dog, he commands our attention even as he deflects it with withering one-liners and the odd, graceless sight gag.  You’re charmed, you’re a bit repulsed; he’s a bit too much to be real.  You also feel just a bit sorry for him, for reasons beyond your immediate comprehension.  You want to take the puppy-eyed man home with you and give a hot meal and train him how to not insult the guests at your dinner parties.

Not long after Ghostbusters — probably his quintessential role — Murray teamed up with journeyman director Richard Donner in a Reagan decade updating of A Christmas Carol, appropriately titled (according to the fratboy tendencies of his bigger hits to date) Scrooged.  His character, Frank Cross, is typical Murray: self-obsessed, mean-spirited, a bit of a con man, a New Yorker.

One of the potentially off-putting aspects of the film is that its presentation somewhat matches Frank’s prickly, imperious character.  The supernatural bits are quite macabre; one of the most chillingly poetic scenes depicts Frank facing the frozen body of a homeless man, embalmed by ice in a statuesque pose, lyrically holding a watch.  As this Bruckheimer-style TV network president ricochets through his diabolical journey, witnessing his mistakes — from dumping the love of his life (Karen Allen, always appealing), to shafting his secretary (Alfre Woodard), who depended upon her Christmas bonus to help her traumatized son — Donner zips along, maintaining a brisk (or, to be more Scroogian, brusque) pace, slotting in small moments for Murray to well with tears, or fire off wisecracks between picaresque visions of how life is and how it should be.

In a way, the movie has everything you need from a feel-good comedy: lots of stars in bit parts (Carol Kane as a pugilistic Glenda the Good Witch!  Buster Poindexter as a ghoulish cabbie!  Bobcat Goldthwait as… Bobcat Goldthwait!), a charismatic leading man, lots of good lines, a happy ending that even includes a sing-a-long musical number.  It’s not particularly “Christmas-y,” which is one of its strengths — Dickens wasn’t a religious man, so he used Christmas as a backdrop to reinforce the general themes of goodwill and generosity, rather than make any grand claims as to what the holiday is “really about,” a deft choice to which many modern storytellers should hearken, rather than water down their doubleplusfeelgood, vague (read: vacuous) moral lessons to avoid offending the religious and nonreligious.  You can feel good about Scrooged as a Christmas movie or an anytime movie, though it works best at the holiday, when you’re deluged by endless reruns of A Christmas Story, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Miracle on 34th Street.  Bill Murray being a mean sonuvabitch is a perfect counteragent.

Glen or Glenda? Upon closer inspection: beer goggles.

And that’s more to the point of the film’s appeal.  Usually, the character of Scrooge is so iconic that you spend your time appreciating how a good actor is able to bring nuance to an old character, to make his redemption believable in a way you hadn’t before considered.  In a way, the players who take on the part are saving his soul more than the plot itself.  With Murray, it’s the opposite.  He has made a career out of playing Ebenezer Scrooge in various incarnations.  Part of his persona’s appeal is that we can’t take him home; we can’t slap him and tell him to shape up.  So many of his movies are stories of redemption.  Usually self-redemption of a sort; his character isn’t so rotten from the beginning that our positive reception of the movie doesn’t hinge on his evolution.  More often than not, we like the guy from the outset.

Scrooge is not a good man, though.  His confidence and defense mechanisms have to be forcibly stripped away, and as difficult as it is to persuade Ebenezer to change his ways, it’s an even more difficult ordeal to reprogram Bill Murray, for whom this kind of role could be played on autopilot.  Instead, the reliably aloof and caustic Murray is dragged kicking and screaming into humanity.  The role itself — the ultimate grump, the most aloof of assholes who is made Fate’s buffoon — overpowers the Murray persona.  By the time the film climaxes, it has unabashedly ascended a rickety soapbox, and Murray delivers a breathless, pentecostal — yet humanist — sermon with the enervated élan  of a televangelist. ¹  Instead of an offensively trite capstone to a latter-day secular fable, Murray’s go-for-broke hard sell works.  Partly because he’s a versatile actor; partly because it’s Bill Murray.  Peter Venkman would have just busted the ghosts of Christmas.  Frank Cross is transformed by them.  That’s the power of a good, old-fashioned Christmas carol.  Hallelujah!²

Edited by Daniel Davis.

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