GHOST TOWN is a film about ghosts, but the focus is not on the afterlife. No, it is firmly in the life of here and now. The ghosts that populate the film are still all too caught up in the lives of those that they have left behind to move on. Unfortunately, for everyone involved the key to their eternal rest is one Bertram Pincus, DDS. Fortunately, he is played by the amazing Ricky Gervais.
Bertram is a man who doesn’t mind crowds, it’s the individuals he dislikes. A solitary man with a precisely ordered life in an coldly tidy apartment and an equally chilly distant relationship with the other people in his office. He has shut himself off from humanity physically and emotionally, fending people off with a gently lethal form of sarcasm. When he goes in for a routine colonoscopy, he emerges from the experience with a different viewpoint. Specifically, he died for seven minutes or so, further specifically, he can now see ghosts. Once the ghosts notice that he can see them, they hound him with pleas for help in taking care of the business they left unfinished in life. Bertram, being a man of consistency, doesn’t like the dead any more than he likes the living, which doesn’t phase Frank (Greg Kinnear), a man who died while trying to work out the details of keeping his wife from finding out about his girlfriend. Said wife, Gwen (Tea Leoni) lives in Bertram’s building and, to Frank’s dismay, is about to remarry a man that Frank is convinced means Gwen no good. All Bertram has to do is stop the wedding and Frank will leave him alone, which seems like a tall order considering Bertram’s lack of people skills. Frank also promises to take the horde of haunts with him, which seems like a tall order considering how very determined they are.
There is no faulting the performances. Gervais nails Bertram’s wounded and tender heart at the core of his self-imposed loneliness. It’s the way he pauses, taking stock of the other person as though mentally calculating the inanity of the situation and forcing himself to be just the right side of civil. Barely. Yet, he’s equally deft delivering a withering riposte with a magnificent understated snarkiness, and at slinking away in self-defense from an office party. Leoni is a perfect match for him, rebuffed, rebuffing and finally charmed in spite of herself as Bertram warms up to the idea of another person in his life and Gwen remembers how to laugh. While this is a film of sharp dialogue, odd asides (a bit of pharonic manhood in a jar livens things up) and not a little sentiment, she is still given a chance to show off her genius for pratfall with the help of a Great Dane co-star. The sentiment, though, comes as a relief rather than a letdown, so fully realized are these characters and so invested does the audience become in them.
Less well done is the editing. It feels as though bits and pieces have been picked away that should be there telling us what Frank, played with a cocksure deviltry by a tuxedo-clad Kinnear, did for a living and how he did it. The World War II nurse, in so many scenes, never gets to speak, much less share with the audience why she’s still there, nor does the audience learn why the naked guy is in a state of undress. In this universe, you wear for eternity what you were wearing when you die. Or didn’t wear, in this case. Sure, it’s good for a few visual jokes, but it’s not the same at sating curiosity.
GHOST TOWN takes a familiar story and makes it into something sweet and substantial. Funny, warm, and comfortable, there is nothing beyond some nitpicks to object to, and it’s easy to be swept along by its good nature.
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