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Review: “Ghost Town”
By Kyle | September 17, 2008
SIXTH SENSE FOR LAUGHS
Kyle Smith review of “Ghost Town”
3.5 stars out of 4
Running time: 103 minutes
Rated PG-13 (profanity, drug references)
Ricky Gervais is lethally funny talking to the dead in his leading-man debut on the big screen, “Ghost Town.”
Imagine David Brent of “The Office” with some brains and a touch of Jack Nicholson’s character in “As Good As It Gets” and you’ve got Dr. Bertram Pincus, a misanthropic dentist who scuttles past the office party on the way out the door so he can get home to his pre-arranged pajamas and his crossword puzzle with its three neatly laid-out pencils. Like Brent, he insults people; unlike Brent, he does it on purpose. He likes being a dentist because he can shove things into people’s mouths when they talk too much: “You’re resting your jaw. I’m resting my ears. We’re all winners.”
In the hospital for a routine bowel procedure that he insists on having done under full anesthesia, he encounters what his doctor (SNL star Kristen Wiig, who is again hilarious in a near cameo and has easily earned the right to play lead roles) calls “a cessation.” Or maybe it was “a biochemical anomaly.” As her lawyer/bouncer looks on, she comes right out with it. “You died. A little bit.”
Now he can see the ghosts of dead people with unfinished business—such as Frank (Greg Kinnear), a sleazy fellow tenant of his Upper East Side building who was cheating on his wife (Tea Leoni) when he died. Frank is haunting/harrying/mocking Dr. Pincus for as long as it takes for Bertram to break up the widow’s relationship with a do-gooder lawyer.
Lots of funny though familiar scenes follow in which Bertram simultaneously fends off the nagging ghosts that follow him everywhere while trying to carry on conversations with living people who can’t hear the ghosts. The situation has been a comedy staple for decades, but an expert chef can make routine ingredients special, and Gervais has both the delivery and the pointed script (co-written by “Jurassic Park” and “Spider-Man” screenwriter David Koepp, who also directs) to deliver major laughs. Throwaway moments that are so natural they seem improvised are especially great, such as when Bertram refuses to answer personal questions asked by a nurse or tells a doorman to stop saying “Bless you” every time he sneezes. Gervais does some classic hate-shtick that harks back to the great insult comics, but with a Brit twist. When he mutters “stenchy ethnic food that stings the eyes,” he’s talking about tacos.
The interaction between Bertram and Frank leads to brilliant odd-couple friction, as when they go to a fancy bar and Frank keeps toolishly twiddling away at his Blackberry, even though it no longer works when you’ve roamed into the great beyond. When Frank starts to outline some situations in which his widow could be tempted away from her current fiancé—“You show up as the cable guy or the innocent pizza guy”—Bertram says, “You watch a lot of porn, don’t you?”
Breaking Bertram out of his shell proves to be a challenge for Frank. When the dentist approaches the widow, the best line he can think of is, “Shoes. Your shoes. Are. Comfortable.”
A plot development isn’t really explained. Frank promises he has the ability to keep the other ghosts from bugging Bertram for favors, but why does Frank have influence over the others?
In the third act, the movie all but announces it’s going to copy “Groundhog Day,” then does so. Some fans of Gervais are going to feel cheated by the blatant sentimentality with which the film wraps up, but a lot of great comedies are bait-and-switch affairs. What “Ghost Town” has on its mind is so immense most dramas never approach it in heft: the yearning to have all of your affairs in order when you die. Though ghost hijinks are a very Hollywood way of dealing with the subject, the twists are executed superbly, right up to a climax that fits the David Mamet definition of what makes for a perfect ending: it is both surprising and inevitable.
September 17th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
So what you’re saying is that tacos are not “stenchy ethnic food that stings the eyes”?
September 17th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Governor Palins reading list.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/governor-palins-reading-l_b_126478.html
And in other news LADY Lynn DE ROTHSCHILD called Barack Obama an “elitist” who “cant relate to average Americans”. Irony is truly dead and the Earth has obviously slipped out of orbit when someone named De Rothschild as in “those Rothschilds”, and has a personal fortune of 600 million has called someone else else “elitist” and “out of touch with the average person”.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Liked so many elements here, especially Tea Leoni, but it didn’t coalesce into a fully-functioning feature for me.