Connor Mead (Matthew McConaughey) is the ultimate player; he's bounced from one quick 'n' easy sexual encounter to the next, leaving the women behind him like tossed away tissues. Like Scrooge in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Mead ends up living through the visitation of four ghosts. First, there's Wayne Mead (Michael Douglas) as the Jacob Marley character, once the partner-in-crime and teacher, and now the lonely ghost merely trying to save his protege from the same fate. And then there are the Ghosts of the Past, Present, and Future.

Having rented the movie for my wife, I found myself laughing out loud over and over again through the first third. Every joke is sexual, and the tension between Connor and his one true love, Jenny (Jennifer Garner), could be a brick wall worth banging your head on. As Connor negotiates the potential for wedding sex at the rehearsal dinner of his brother, Paul (Breckin Meyer), he finds himself dodging bullets from the one who got away and the many who he couldn't even remember. But after his encounter with Wayne, the female ghosts start coming...

Allison Vandermeersh (Emma Stone) and Melanie (Noureen DeWulf) play it to the hilt in the roles of the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present... oops, I mean the Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and Present. They're funny and brutal, and while Connor says that love isn't real and that weddings are artificial games that people play, Paul tries to prove to his brother and his bride that love is real and marriage is forever. But Connor proves to be too full of hijinks, too bitter, and too loveless, in much the way that Scrooge remains hostile to poverty and the state of the poor in the original. There's nothing that the ghosts, Jenny, or Paul can do to prove it otherwise to Connor, and then he's kicked out andhis third encountertakes place.

I think the original Carol is pretty splendid, especially the George C. Scott version, so it didn't take much to convince me that a movie combining the structure of Dickens' classic and a romantic comedy about love was swinging for the fences. When you replace love with money (and the Bible has plenty to say about that), the resulting carol or parable says a lot about what it means to be committed to one person in a monogamous relationship, what it means for love to be something that rises above loss, death, and loneliness, and what it means to believe and hope in the ability for someone to change.

McConaughey has a pivotal role here of course, but the kind of love that redeems and saves the principal characters is (in my estimation) a love of Biblical proportions. Connor has been taught that the person who cares the least is the one who has the power in the relationship; he will later agree that the more careless person might be more powerful, but not necessarily happy. In a twist, he says that he would rather become like his brother, who gives love to everyone and is therefore sacrificial and full of meaning.

Call it cliched, but not trite, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past has more than a little to teach us about what it really means to love.