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Scrooge the sex pest: why Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is the most toxic Dickens film ever made

Toxic, unfunny, cheesy and misogynist: Matthew McConaughey in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past - Alamy
Toxic, unfunny, cheesy and misogynist: Matthew McConaughey in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past - Alamy

Each December the entertainment industry unwraps a shiny new version of A Christmas Carol. This year it’s a Dickens’s triple-dip. We’ve already had Olivia Colman, Luke Evans and Jessie Buckley in the animated Scrooge: A Christmas Carol and Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell in Spirited, a soulless stab at an origin story for the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. What next – Suranne Jones playing a Scrooge-adjacent online entrepreneur in a Sky movie? Yes, Christmas Carole debuts on Christmas Eve. Ho, ho, help us all.

Scrooge and Spirited are both toe-curling with bells on; A Christmas Carole sounds pretty “Bah Humbug” too. Yet in the power rankings of the sorriest Scrooge-to-screen adaptation, they aren’t even in the half-penny place. Because the title of Worst Ever Christmas Carol will forever reside with Matthew McConaughey’s 2009 hell-spawn romcom, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.

Toxic, unfunny, cheesy and sexist– and those are its more positive attributes – the film landed with the splat of a turkey dropped from height (the terrible reviews admittedly offset by a robust $100 million box office).

Among other unfortunate consequences, it has cast a seemingly permanent stain on the reputation of director Mark Waters. On an upward trajectory after Mean Girls in 2004, he was last seen directing the ghastly He’s All That, a gender-flipped remake of She’s All That churned out for Netflix in 2021.

But Ghosts of Girlfriends Past was also the abomination from which sprang the McConaissance – Matthew McConaughey’s journey from sappy romantic lead to gnarled character actor and Oscar winner. Ghosts was his final rom-com; four years later he was method-acting his way to an Academy Award for Dallas Buyers Club and hoovering up every plaudit going for True Detective. His Dickens debacle was where it all changed for him.

Jennifer Garner and Matthew McConaughey in The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
Jennifer Garner and Matthew McConaughey in The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

That’s probably as well because it’s hard to imagine a charismatic leading man sinking any lower. He slips into the loafers of Connor Mead, ace fashion photographer, womanising bachelor and Scrooge stand-in – as we discover when he is visited by three ghosts, starting with his first kiss, played by Emma Stone.

These spirits take him on a tour of his empty existence as a serial lothario: by sun-up, he realises there is more to life than being a perma-tanned creep. The tale has nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas, though you suspect that this would be the least of Dickens's objections.

You can see why McConaughey quit the rom-com game immediately afterwards. In hits such as The Wedding Planner and How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, the Texan is charm on a stick. Here, acting opposite a bored and baffled-looking Jennifer Garner (as the true love that got away) he is dead-eyed, irritated and quietly appalled. Maybe, beneath the million-dollar smile and southern fried irascibility, it has dawned on him that there is something deeply dislikable about Connor Mead.

If so, he wasn’t alone in feeling that way. “Matthew McConaughey as cardboard cutout misogynist, in one too many phone-it-in romcoms featuring toxic bachelors,” said the US-based Women Film Critics Circle, which voted Ghosts of Girlfriends Past into its Hall of Shame.

“Neither remotely romantic nor passably comic,” concurred the New York Times. Every female character, noted Time Out, was either “a neurotic shrew or a sex-starved harpy”.

We are introduced to Connor, as he is about to snap a young pop star for Vanity Fair. She arrives fully clothed but quicker than you can say sexual harassment lawsuit Mead insists she disrobe to her underwear while he places an apple on her head. She screams as an archer arrives and bisects the fruit, giving Mead his “money shot”.

Post-MeToo, it is unthinkable that such a scene would end up on the screen. It’s sort of astonishing that it did in 2009. And it turns out our charming hero is just getting started. He drives to his brother’s wedding and immediately tells his sibling to run for hills, declaring “love is magic comfort food for the weak and uneducated”.

Next he pervs all over the bride’s mother – played by an appalled Anne Archer – and accidentally destroys the wedding cake. And then reveals that the groom cheated on the bride with one of the bridesmaids in the early stages of the relationship, thus placing the knot-tying in jeopardy. In 2022, they’d lock him up and blast the keys into outer space.

Dead-eyed Matthew McConaughey as the womanising bachelor Connor Mead (centre) with bored and baffled-looking Jennifer Garner as his love interest - Film Stills
Dead-eyed Matthew McConaughey as the womanising bachelor Connor Mead (centre) with bored and baffled-looking Jennifer Garner as his love interest - Film Stills

Mead is, in other words, completely and unapologetically without redeeming features. That isn’t to say, though, the film constructed around him is entirely lacking charm. What spark it possesses derives from two stand-out performances. Stone, in braces and terrible sixth-form hair, excels as the Ghost of Girlfriends Past. And then there is Michael Douglas, who takes on the Jacob Marley role of Connor’s womanising uncle, Wayne.

Douglas, who became a movie star by playing a string of toxic men in films such as Fatal Attraction and Wall Street, portrays Wayne as a mix of Hugh Heffner and Neil Strauss, author of “pick-up artist” primer, The Game. It’s a devilish turn – confirming that, when it comes to turbo-charged creeps, McConaughey cannot hold a candle to Douglas.

“Here's a couple of tips,” Wayne tells the teenage Mead in a flashback that present-day Connor watches with Emma Stone. “When you first meet a girl you give her two compliments above the neck. Yeah, tell her she's got nice lips, nice eyes, nice hair... she's intelligent, her moral ethics, whatever crap comes to your mind. Then... You insult her! Flip the power dynamic and you let her know that you're here to play.”

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past has a history as chequered as its premise. It was written by fledging screenwriters Scott Moore and Jon Lucas. They would go on to pen The Hangover before their careers overheated and fizzled out. And fizzle is the word: their most recent movie, 2019's Jexi, is about “a self-aware smartphone that becomes emotionally attached to its socially awkward owner”.

Michael Douglas is womanising uncle Wayne to Matthew McConaughey's Connor in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past - Cinematic Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
Michael Douglas is womanising uncle Wayne to Matthew McConaughey's Connor in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past - Cinematic Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

The project started at Disney, which had acquired it through its subsidiary Touchstone. Kevin Smith, the low-budget cult director behind Clerks, was initially set to bring it to the screen, with his pal Ben Affleck – then married to Jennifer Garner – starring. In 2003, however, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past was nixed by Harvey Weinstein with whom Smith had a “First look” deal at Miramax.

Miramax was at that point owned by Disney. But the relationship between Disney boss Michael Eisner and Weinstein was on a downward trajectory and the partnership would end in 2005. Smith believes that is why Weinstein vetoed him from directing for Touchstone. As sweetener, he offered to help Smith fulfil his dream of rebooting the character of Fletch (portrayed in the Eighties by Chevy Chase and John Hamm in a 2022 sequel).

Smith would direct, with Affleck starring and Weinstein producing. Twenty years ago, this read like a dream ticket rather than a waking nightmare. The complicating factor was that Affleck had already agreed to work with Disney. And with his romcom Gigli in the midst of becoming a mega-flop, he was wary of stepping on the tail of House of Mouse.

He needn’t have worried. Even without the Weinstein factor, Eisner was leery about Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. “It’s going to be tough to pull off… he[the main character] is hateable. Two, can you play Don Juan [the semi-mythical “world’s greatest lover] jokes for two hours?” he said to executives.

Then came his final objection. Was Dickens’s classic tale of moral redemption and goodwill to all men all that great to begin with? “You know,” he said, “sometimes A Christmas Carol is very boring. Going back to the ghosts stops the action. You want to know what happens next….It’s one note.”

Stand-out performance: Emma Stone, in braces and terrible sixth-form hair, in The Ghost of Girlfriends Past - WENN Rights Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
Stand-out performance: Emma Stone, in braces and terrible sixth-form hair, in The Ghost of Girlfriends Past - WENN Rights Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Six years later, the movie was resurrected at New Line, with McConaughey and Affleck’s then-wife, Garner. The real twist, though, is perhaps that Ghosts of Girlfriends Past provided its star with his own ‘Scrooge’ moment. As Hollywood’s favourite romantic lead, he’d blown hot and cold in the preceding decade and was never as naturalistic as when making his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. But for the Prince of Romcoms, this was a new low.

The dead look in his eyes throughout suggests he had finally realised that he was throwing away his career on lowest denominator dross. At the end of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge accepts that, unless he changes his ways, he is doomed to live out his days in spiritual poverty. McConaughey at some point during the making of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past appears to have been struck by a similar insight. And just like Dickens’s most famous creation, he reversed course, instructing his agent to turn down all romcom offers and put out the word that he was up for more serious parts.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past was a nadir for McConaughey. It also paved the way for the McConaissance. At Christmas, or any other time of year, that’s the perfect happy ending.