American Carol
by Spencer Warren
Issue 117 - October 9, 2008

Good news! An American Carol fully meets expectations. Director David Zucker and his writers employ their considerable comedic talent in a scorched-earth campaign against just about all of America's Politically Correct (i.e. Cultural Marxist) enemies, leaving them crushed in the dust - by ridicule and laughter!

The clever plot is adapted from Charles Dickens's beloved A Christmas Carol - except that the miserly old Scrooge is replaced by the slovenly, radical left-nihilist non-thinker Michael Moore, named Michael Malone in the film. He is played to perfection by Kevin P. Farley; indeed, he may be more Michael Moore than Michael Moore himself, which is a tribute to the stiletto accuracy of the film's satire. Where in the Dickens tale Scrooge is presented with a truthful view of the miserable life he has led by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, and then redeems himself, here Malone is instructed in the truth about America's rightness and our radical Muslim enemies' evil by none other than General George S. Patton (Kelsey Grammer) and President John F. Kennedy (Chriss Anglin).

Accompanied by General Patton, Malone is forced to take time out from his real-life campaign to abolish the Fourth of July. They look on as Neville Chamberlain literally wipes Hitler's boots (and also Mussolini's and Tojo's) as he signs away Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938. Like Malone (as well as many of the leaders and base of today's Democrat Party), Chamberlain believed the sweet reason of appeasement and "talking" would prevent war. As Chamberlain makes this point, facing their boots, the evil trio break into song, Adolf leading them in a rousing rendition of "Kumbaya," the folk song once popularized in the 1950s and '60s by the pious folk-singers Pete Seeger (a one-time Communist) and Joan Baez. The use of the song here also can be seen as a sarcastic comment on the earnest, extreme naïveté on display. (Zucker also used the song in a campaign advertisement several years ago to mock Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: the song is sung as she blithely welcomes some terrorists.)

In another stop on Malone's journey of discovery, Patton shows him what his ancestral home in Alabama looks like today because President Lincoln agreed with him that nothing is worth fighting for and allowed the South to secede. Much to Michael's horror, the Malone plantation house of 2008 is still tended by black slaves, happy and as simple-minded as the old racist stereotype. One of his bastard sons, "Bacon Stains" Malone (Gary Coleman) is happily wiping the car and in the front yard scores of "darkies" are joyfully singing and picking in the cotton field. As Patton escorts Malone away, one of the slave children calls out, "Good-bye, Daddy." There are quite a few more belly-laughs like this to come.

This is the broad, hilarious brand of humor Zucker applied in Airplane! and The Naked Gun. He and his co-writers (Myrna Sokoloff and Lewis Friedman) are very accomplished at bringing off just the right, light comedic tone - even when Patton shoots up the ACLU Frankenstein-like zombies dressed in lawyers' suits to free a courtroom from their unconstitutional depravations. Veteran actor Dennis Hopper is the judge whose expert marksmanship brings down the ACLU monsters as they try to remove the Ten Commandments from his courtroom wall. (Hopper's appearance is curious in that in 1969 he directed perhaps the most vicious anti-American movie ever made, Easy Rider. He must need the money.)

The filmmakers also are superb when their comedy briefly shifts to moving solemnity in the highlight of the movie, when Malone encounters George Washington (superbly and very convincingly created by Jon Voight). Malone has been taken to St. Paul's Church on Broadway in downtown Manhattan; this eighteenth century church is still in use, and it is where Washington worshipped the morning of his inauguration (a few blocks away) in 1789 as the first president of the United States of America. (Had they been around then, the mainstream media would have been howling in protest at this "violation" of the mythical separation of church and state.) Washington first appears to Malone standing, in his general's full-dress uniform, near the pulpit. He shows him the chair in which he prayed, which is still on display in the church. (This is all true; I have been there.) With great dignity and unassuming authority, the Father of our country tells Malone that freedom is our most precious gift, but that to preserve it we must distinguish freedom from license. Then he asks Malone to join him at the rear of the church, where he opens the wood doors to reveal the macabre, surrealist wreck of the World Trade Center, which did indeed stand one block behind St. Paul's: an unforgettable image viewed from inside the church, with Washington standing alongside.

Before they are finished, Zucker and company have demolished the ignorant, empty-headed, self-righteous student protestors; their neo-Marxist professors (scene at one of the worst left-wing universities, once proud Columbia); Move-on.org (depicted as MooveAhead.org, presenting Malone with its Leni Riefensthal documentary award); and fellow travelers like the pro-terrorist Jimmy Carter. Rosie O'Donnell and other anti-Christian bigots are skewered - Rosie O'Connell's fabricated "documentary" about Christian terrorists results in such extreme airport security measures that passengers are forced to disrobe completely and be examined in the manner, shall we say, of a prostate exam!). Hollywood leftists are given the ridicule they have so richly earned - thus, when Malone is shown the Muslim Hollywood that resulted from our failure to win the war against Muslim terror, we see a Burkha boutique. These Muslim radicals also are observed for what they are: Eyeing a gorgeous blond at a cocktail party with Malone, who has befriended three such terrorists (not dreaming for a second who they really are), one of them cracks, "She'd look great in a burkha." Like the peerless Frank Capra in classics like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and State of the Union (1948), An American Carol offers an object lesson in how comedy can be employed to make serious points better than drama.

Our men and women (mostly men are shown) in uniform are the heroes of the film; Zucker celebrates them in the film's climax in Madison Square Garden, at a country music concert hosted by Trace Adkins, which is the Muslim villain's target. Zucker also movingly celebrates our once proud, pre-1960s movie heritage. Thus, Malone, even in his pure Michael Moore phase, aspires to move beyond his "documentaries" and become a great epic director like John Ford; a poster of Ford's famous epic shooting location for many of his Westerns, Monument Valley with its buttes and mesas, adorns Malone's bedroom wall. And viewers should not miss the line near the end when the soldier who (Malone fantasized) has stolen his dream girl, tells him as he heads off for Iraq that now that Malone is on America's side, "I know we're going to win." This is a wonderful reference to the immortal Casablanca (1942); these are the words of the resistance hero Victor Laszlo (Paul Henried) to Rick (Humphrey Bogart) at the airport in the film's finale, when Laszlo sees that it is the once cynical Rick who has arranged for his and Ilsa's (Ingrid Bergman) flight to Portugal and thence to America, from where he will continue the fight against the Nazis.

An American Carol is the most important conservative movie since Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ (2004). Readers are urged to go out and see it. You will enjoy lots of laughs and show the movie industry there is indeed a market for conservative movies.

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline On Line's media critic.