A horrifying glimpse into an alternate reality where people find Matthew McConaughey attractive
Up next in the ‘My Girlfriend Made Us Watch’ series is a movie I had never heard of but my girlfriend owns on DVD and has seen more times than she can count. It is, unsurprisingly, a rom-com, but given my newfound ability to enjoy the genre (with some exceptions), I was looking forward to the experience.
Much like how I only began to take notice of Mark Ruffalo post The Avengers (give teenage Kieran a break; he didn’t know Zodiac or Shutter Island even existed), I embarrassingly didn’t have much of an idea of who Matthew McConaughey was before True Detective. In the decade since that show aired, I have of course brushed up on McConaughey’s filmography, but I never paid much heed to his rom-coms. They weren’t for me.
Right?
True Photographer
When photographer and womaniser Connor Mead (McConaughey) shows up for his brother’s wedding, he’s visited by the ghost of his playboy uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas) who informs Connor that he will be visited by three more ghosts, each of whom will endeavour to teach him the error of his womanising ways by taking him through the past, present, and future of his relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Jenny (Jennifer Garner).
It’s A Christmas Carol with misogyny.
Weirdly enough, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. On paper, there’s nothing wrong with a character starting from a place of objectifying every woman he sees to the point where they stop becoming people to him and broadening his perspective through the narrative until he realises how skewed and wrong he’s been all along.
Where Ghosts of Girlfriends Past fails in this regard is that Connor seems to be pretty happy as a rampant womaniser. Put aside the otherworldly logic wherein every woman Connor meets is unfailingly charmed to the point of nudity by his smarmy, pick-up-artist demeanour, the movie never goes out of its way to present this as a bad thing. It’s like the writers were afraid of portraying McConoughey as uncool or overtly dislikeable in the slightest, even though that’s all someone like this could ever be in real life.
You could argue that we’re supposed to understand that Connor is obviously supposed to be a Not Nice Guy, but this movie came out in 2009. Barney Stinson was sleeping his way through New York City on How I Met Your Mother and everyone loved him for it. We needed at least one scene that would let us overtly hate Connor—or at least one woman who didn't want to sleep with him.
Misogyny aside, this inability on the part of the writers to commit to making Connor truly dislikeable results in a weaker story overall. When (spoilers, I suppose) he realises the error of his ways and commits to loving Jenny, his ‘transformation’ doesn’t have any weight. Rom-coms are predictable to an extent, but there was nothing about Connor’s character that had me sceptical that he’d find love in the end—after all, everybody in the movie thought he was the hottest thing since Elvis.
Worst Man
There are a couple of good moments scattered throughout the movie. The best is when Connor’s forced to watch Jenny crying after he left her back when they were dating. Another good one is during the ‘future’ section of the movie, when he’s forced to watch what how his actions at the wedding will affect his brother later in life. What can I say? It’s fun to watch shitty characters come face-to-face with consequences.
Emma Stone is in this movie as the ghost of Connor’s first ‘girlfriend’ (“We dated for thirty-nine minutes, and it was the best two-thirds of an hour in my young life”). Honestly, I think she might be my favourite part of the movie. She plays the polar opposite of her character from Zombieland which came out the same year. Over-eager, passionate, giggly; Allison doesn’t possess an ounce of composure, but is able to cut Connor down to size when necessary.
Jennifer Garner as Jenny is fine. She can verbally spar with Connor when she has to, but she doesn’t have much of a character arc. Her choice to forgive Connor for his misdeeds lands with a thud because I never expected any other outcome given how little interest the movie had in her character.
Again, it’s not like this was going to go down any other way—not in a broad-appeal rom-com like this—but I think that a good rom-com should make you wonder how the two parties could ever reconcile their differences and get together. There should be an inkling of doubt about whether they'll end up together.
Conclusion
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is a completely fine movie that pretty much falls apart under any kind of scrutiny. The performances are good, and can sometimes be funny in a vacuum, but are often undercut by dated jokes that will have anybody groaning in 2024. The end-of-act-two crisis is bizarre in how it bends over backwards in an attempt to make a wedding-ruining revelation Connor’s fault somehow, but in the end, the shakiest part of this movie is it’s foundation: the character of Connor Mead.
There’s simply such a vast disconnect between how everyone in the movie perceives Connor and how a modern-day audience perceives him. I suppose at the end of the day, I am overthinking this. Nobody’s putting on Ghosts of Girlfriends Past for a critical analysis of the patriarchy and toxic masculinity. This is a ‘I want to watch attractive people flirt’ movie, and in that regard, I guess it's a success.
***
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