Ghost Town

[rating:3.5]
Director: David Koepp
Starring: Ricky Gervais, Greg Kinnear, Téa Leoni

So Ghost Town has a silly premise to launch a fairly familiar journey for a mean, lonely man who needs to let his love light shine. It has some good moments, largely provided by Ricky Gervais’ infallible comic delivery, and his terrific chemistry with costars Greg Kinnear and Téa Leoni, but it’s not the sum of the parts that make this movie worth seeing, it’s the sum of what’s not there.

At no point in this film do large globs of semen hang from Leoni’s earlobes. There are no small pets using human toilets or biting people in the crotch or being fatally abused. There is a naked guy played for comedy, but we never get the full monte for a cheap laugh. Racist stereotypes are not the comic crutch. Absolutely no pies were sexually violated in the making of this movie.

I’m not saying there’s no place for gross-out comedy, for the laughter of the extreme squirm. Hell, I think it deserves an entire shelf at the video store. But a film that takes some good actors and tries to walk them through a story about human emotion rather than a slapstick series of fart jokes just seems … do I want to say quaint? I kinda want to say “a relief.”

The plot basics: An incident gives Gervais the unwanted ability to see the scores of ghosts lingering around New York City with unfinished business. Through cleverness undisclosed, a ghostly Kinnear makes himself the only one to extensively bend Gervais’ ear, with the mission of breaking up the widowed Leoni’s new engagement, which Gervais does through the improbable tactic of trying to make her fall in love with him, instead. (The film doesn’t seem to know what it is. The title and the tag line (“He sees dead people … and they annoy him”) refer to the window dressing, not the crux of the plot.)

If you’ve ever seen a film where a guy builds a relationship with a woman through lies or ulterior motives, but then falls for her, but she’s gonna be SO mad when she finds out, then you kinda see where this is going to end up. To the filmmakers’ credit, they don’t play it so broadly that you see every Requisite Plot Moment coming toward you, and you can accept the film within the standard rules of the romantic comedy genre, which is that it’s not the outcome, but whether you enjoy the journey.

What we have in Ghost Town, then, is a good date movie with some solid laugh-out-loud moments. It might’ve gelled better if director DIR and his cowriter had done one more draft. They might’ve matched the script to their actors, for one thing. Opening with Greg Kinnear as some kind of wicked New York hardass is a pretty tough sell. Eventually he’s more a schmuck, a louse beset by his own weaknesses, with is more in Kinear’s range. And when given a predictable moment of character revelation, he plays it with his usual grace.

Gervais is great fun to watch, but is arguably miscast. He’s Bertram Pinckus, DDS, an antisocial misanthrope who responds to basic kindness with a blank stare. This is at odds with the performance that emerges, as Gervais scores laugh-out-loud lines with a put-upon attitude and dry sarcasm. This, and stammering awkwardness, is what Gervais does best, and judging from how sincerely Téa Leoni seems to crack up, he may have added much of this on the set. If so, it both prevents the movie from feeling entirely cohesive and saves it from mediocrity. While Gervais’ trademark awkward rambling is well-used, he’s not playing a David Brent, a loser with no self-awareness. It’s enough of a stretch to make him sort of viable as a leading man.

Leoni is a pleasure to watch. Her role is straight and laden with heavy emotion, but she’s at her best when engaged with Gervais, where the chemistry actually makes the schlubby and asocial Gervais viable as a leading man for this likable New York babe.

Maybe it’s just a summer action hangover, or that I’m seeing the wrong films in general, but a film that attempts to tell a human-scale story that isn’t painfully ponderous and grim, and doesn’t traffic in the artificially quirky or, you know, pie-fucking, is just a rare damned pleasure.

Tags: comedy, ghosts, greg kinnear