You can't always run from your past.
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)
Celebrity photographer Connor Mead lives life in the fast lane, committed to lifelong bachelorhood and simultaneous relationships with multiple women. On the eve of his younger brother Paul's wedding, Connor's mockery of love proves a real buzz-kill for everyone - including his childhood crush, Jenny, the one woman who always seemed immune to his considerable charms. Later that night, he gets a wake-up call from the ghost of his late Uncle Wayne, the hard-partying, legendary ladies' man who was Connor's mentor. Uncle Wayne has an urgent message which he delivers through three ghosts who guide Connor on an eye-opening tour of his romantic past, present and future. Along the way, they attempt to discern whether he will ever be able to change his ways -- and if there is any hope of him finding true love.
rating 6/10 User rating 2,393 votes 60% ❄ Christmas Connection
The film is a direct adaptation of A Christmas Carol, with the ghost visitation structure lifted wholesale from Dickens. The wedding takes place at Christmas, snow falls throughout, and the entire moral arc mirrors the original holiday redemption story. It's Christmas in the same way the source material is Christmas: the holiday is the engine, not the backdrop.
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Our Review
The pitch for Ghosts of Girlfriends Past must have taken about thirty seconds. "What if Scrooge was a womanizer, and instead of business partners and the poor, the ghosts showed him all the women he'd wronged?" Warner Bros. said yes, handed over $37.5 million, and the result is a film that is simultaneously dumber than it sounds and more watchable than it deserves to be.
Matthew McConaughey plays Connor Mead, a celebrity fashion photographer whose romantic philosophy is somewhere between Hugh Hefner and a motivational poster for sociopaths. His brother Paul (Breckin Meyer) is getting married at the family estate, and Connor shows up mostly to object. Then Michael Douglas appears as the ghost of Connor's deceased uncle Wayne, a legendary skirt-chaser who taught Connor everything he knows about emotional unavailability, and the A Christmas Carol machinery kicks into gear.
Why This Christmas Movie Actually Works
The Dickens structure is airtight, and that's the film's secret weapon. Jon Lucas and Scott Moore's screenplay doesn't try to reinvent the template -- it just populates it with romantic comedy beats. The Ghost of Girlfriends Past (Emma Stone, doing a lot with a small role) takes Connor through a blur of failed conquests. The Ghost of Girlfriends Present shows him the collateral damage of his lifestyle in real time. The Ghost of Girlfriends Future delivers the obligatory cemetery scene.
What makes it function better than its 27% Rotten Tomatoes score suggests is McConaughey's genuine comedic commitment. This was the tail end of his rom-com era, right before the McConaissance, and he plays Connor's awfulness with enough self-awareness to keep it watchable. He's not charming despite being terrible. He's charming because he's aware of how terrible he is, and that distinction matters.
Jennifer Garner plays Jenny Perotti, Connor's childhood sweetheart and the one who got away, with the thankless dignity the role requires. She's essentially the moral center of a movie that doesn't entirely deserve one. Garner was Ben Affleck's real-life wife at the time of filming, and there's a small piece of casting trivia attached to this: the project was originally developed in 2004 with Ben Affleck attached to play Connor, with Kevin Smith directing. Both walked away, Disney killed it, and years later when New Line Cinema revived the project, Affleck's wife ended up in the film playing the love interest his character was supposed to pursue.
Michael Douglas, the Ghost of Romantic Comedy Future
The casting of Michael Douglas as Uncle Wayne is the film's boldest choice and its most entertaining one. Douglas plays the role like a man who has read every Playboy centerfold ever printed and considers them instructional texts. He's having obvious fun, and the movie knows to let him run.
The production also quietly reunited Douglas with Anne Archer -- his co-star from the 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction -- though the two share no scenes together. Fatal Attraction was one of the defining films about romantic obsession of its era, which makes their presence here, in a comedy about the consequences of treating relationships as disposable, either deliberate irony or a very good coincidence.
The Christmas Credentials
The film was released on May 1, 2009, which is an interesting choice for a movie set entirely at Christmas. Opening weekend brought in $15.4 million across 3,175 theaters, debuting at number two behind X-Men Origins: Wolverine's $85.1 million. The movie eventually earned $102.4 million worldwide on its $37.5 million budget, making it a modest commercial success that nobody particularly remembers.
The Christmas setting isn't incidental. The wedding, the snow, the family gathering, the ghosts -- these elements are all Christmas Carol DNA. Dickens set his story at Christmas because the holiday amplifies both generosity and loneliness. The film understands this. Connor's transformation has to happen at Christmas because that's when emotional reckonings hit hardest, when the gap between who you are and who you should be is most visible.
It's not a great film. But it's competent at what it sets out to do, which is more than you can say for most Christmas Carol adaptations that replace Scrooge with a contemporary jerk and hope the structure does the heavy lifting. At least this one casts Michael Douglas to haunt the proceedings in a smoking jacket.
Fun Facts
The project was originally set up at Touchstone Pictures in 2004 with Ben Affleck as the lead and Kevin Smith as director. Both departed, Disney cancelled it, and New Line Cinema eventually picked it up years later -- with Affleck's then-wife Jennifer Garner cast in the film instead.
The film was primarily shot at Crane Estate (also called Castle Hill) in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a 165-acre historic property originally built for Chicago plumbing magnate Richard Crane Jr. in 1927.
The church scene where Jenny is shown marrying another man was filmed at the Martha-Mary Chapel in Sudbury, Massachusetts -- a small chapel built by Henry Ford in the 1940s in honor of his mother and mother-in-law, located on the grounds of the historic Wayside Inn.
Michael Douglas and Anne Archer appear in the same film for the first time since Fatal Attraction in 1987 -- the psychological thriller about a dangerous romantic obsession -- though the two share no scenes in this movie.
Actress Christa B. Allen plays the teenage version of Jennifer Garner's character Jenny, the same role she had played opposite Garner in 13 Going on 30 (2004). Allen specialized in playing younger versions of adult actresses throughout the mid-2000s.
The film earned $102.4 million worldwide against a production budget of $37.5 million, but opened in second place on May 1, 2009, behind X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which grossed $85.1 million in its opening weekend alone.
Emma Stone plays the Ghost of Girlfriends Past in one of her earlier Hollywood roles. The film came out the same year as Zombieland, which launched her to much wider recognition.
The screenplay was written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who would go on to write the Hangover trilogy -- a fact that reframes Connor Mead's worldview as less romantic comedy quirk and more early rehearsal for that franchise's particular brand of arrested-development comedy.
Cast
