Ghost Town (DreamWorks, Spyglass Entertainment, Pariah, Paramount, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Thursday night, after the bizarre four-day hate-fest of the Republican National “Convention” — featuring Donald Trump’s 70-minute speech warning of monsters —anarchists, socialists, gangsters, thugs and all the other menaces Trump imagines when he sees people peacefully protest police brutality against people of color loosed in the streets of America to destroy its major cities and end suburbia as we know it, with only himself and his administration standing between the U.S. and socialist/anarchist lawlessness (and presumably the burning of babies and churches) — I looked for a movie comedy I could show Charles and lighten our moods. I found it in Ghost Town, a 2008 DreamWorks production made under Paramount auspices (after Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenbach sold their company not to Universal, as had been expected, but to Paramount) co-written (with John Kamps) and directed by David Koepp. David Koepp’s name is a surprising one to see on a movie like this since he’s best known for writing action-adventure blockbusters — his most famous credit is adapting Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park for Spielberg’s 1993 film that kicked off a blockbuster franchise which is still going strong — and he’s not exactly the sort of person whose name you expect to see on a comedy.

Ghost Town is actually a ghost story, though the central character, dentist Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais), is neither fully alive nor fully dead. He went into the hospital for a routine colonoscopy aud emerged after having “died” for seven minutes, courtesy of an anesthetic he was allergic to, so he finds himself able to live a normal life and interact with other humans while also being in touch with a whole world of ghosts who are haunting New York City and won’t be able to get on with their (after)lives until they complete some piece of unfinished business they had in this world. The ghost that particularly haunts Dr. Pincus is Frank Herlihy (Greg Kinnear), who as the movie begins is walking down a New York street chewing out a real estate agent who mistakenly called Frank’s wife Gwen (Téa Leoni) with news of an apartment Frank was actually renting for his mistress Amber (whom we never see).

There’s a nice shot of one of those air conditioners you load into a window being put into an apartment in a building Frank is walking by, and obviously we’re being set up to believe that the couple who are installing it and are going to lose control, whereupon Frank will be crushed to death by the falling air conditioner. Only he steps out of the way to avoid the falling air conditioner — only to be hit and fatally injured by a passing bus, an artful reworking of one of Buster Keaton’s favorite gags (his car stalls on train tracks, a train bears down on him but turns out to be on a different track, then another train going the opposite direction bears down on Keaton and hits his car). The big piece of unfinished business Frank has on earth is to prevent Gwen from remarrying — specifically, remarrying a guy she presumably started dating just after Frank croaked, or maybe just before Frank croaked once she found out he’d been cheating on her, who seems to be a nice enough guy (he’s attractive, personable and works as a human-rights lawyer) but for some reason Frank takes a strong dislike to him and insists that Pincus do what he can to break them up.

The severely socially challenged Pincus seems like the last person you’d want to entrust to a mission like that — the fellow dentist he shares his office with, Jehangir Prashar (Aasif Mandyi), calls him a “fucking prick” for his total lack of social skills — especially when the co-conspirators decide that the way to get Gwen away from the human rights attorney is for Pincus to woo her himself. Accordingly there are some Cyrano de Bergerac-esque scenes with Frank communicating instructions to Pincus on his dates with Gwen — remember that Pincus can see Frank but no one else can, so when Pincus talks to Frank everyone else thinks he’s just talking to himself. Another complication is that Gwen is a well-known Egyptologist who’s preparing a major art exhibit of pieces from the tomb of a recently discovered mummy, and one of Pincus’s tasks in wooing her is to go to her lectures and feign interest when he has no idea of what she’s talking about. At one point Pincus begs off the job — and Frank strikes back by sending him huge numbers of New York City ghosts, including a man who was killed after he put his child’s favorite toy under the front seat of his car, and she’s been inconsolable ever since because her mom had no idea where it was; and an older woman who’s trying to bring her two daughters back together by getting one of them a letter the other left for her, but only mom knew its location.

Pincus accomplishes these missions, leading to a cool special effect in which the dead people, now fully freed from the burden of ghost-dom, literally crumble into dust as they leave the frame and move on to wherever Koepp and Kamps think we go after we die — and there’s a haunting closeup of the woman whose child has their toy back that made me wonder if Koepp and Kamps were going to have Pincus end up with her after globe-trotting Gwen fulfills her lifelong dream of a six-month assignment doing archaeology in the Valley of the Kings and then returns to her human-rights attorney. Instead Pincus himself gets run down by a bus (according to this movie, the biggest single threat to your life in New York City is bus drivers who run people down as they’re crossing streets!) and it’s touch and go whether he will join Frank in the afterlife, but it pretty much ends the way you expected it too all along, with Pincus surviving (and losing, at least for now, his toehold in the afterlife) and pairing up with Gwen for a quite unlikely relationship at the end.

Ghost Town isn’t exactly the freshest premise for a movie ever — Charles and I both thought of all the supernatural films there’ve been over the years that posited either a living person who was supposed to die or a dead person who was supposed to live, including Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death a.k.a. Stairway to Heaven, and more recent films like Ghost with Whoopi Goldberg — but it’s done with quite a lot of charm and in particular it gives Ricky Gervais a surprisingly sympathetic role. Gervais’ main reputation is as the insult comic who’s done several Golden Globe award shows and made snarkiness his stock in trade, but here he’s a character we end up liking even though he starts out the movie as a self-absorbed jerk. The part of Bertram Pincus gives Gervais a chance to play pathos — at which he’s surprisingly good — and though I could readily imagine this basic plot being made in the 1940’s with Lou Costello as Pincus and Bud Abbott as Frank (indeed, Abbott and Costello did make a quite good ghost movie, The Time of Their Lives, in 1946, though it was a major box-office flop and Universal moved them back to more formulaic fare), it’s nice to know Gervais has more in him than just superficial meanness. And there’s terror as well as humor in the thought of hundreds of ghosts prowling the streets of a major city, each seeking the chance to do whatever they left undone in their normal lives!