Spirited 'Ghost' a delightfully spooky comedy
Wit, feeling and verbal style are often in short supply in modern Hollywood romantic comedies, especially since Woody Allen fled for England and Europe. But that's not so in David Koepp's spookily delightful Manhattan melody "Ghost Town," a "Topper"-like gem about ghosts, seduction and not entirely painless dentistry.
It's a film that has real cinematic gifts to offer us: spot-on actors, brainy writing and some of the high style, sparkle and agility we loved in the old screwball comedies of the 1930s and '40s.
What it doesn't have is a classic romantic comedy hero - a Cary Grant type - in the lead. Instead it has Ricky Gervais, the hilarious boss of the British TV version of "The Office," and an actor who reminds you more of tart-tongued '30s movie comedians like Eric Blore or Groucho Marx - or even of Roland Young, the wry chap who played Cosmo Topper, the gent who, alone in the world, could see the spectral antics of the playboy ghost played by Grant.
There's a parallel here in "Ghost Town": Gervais' persnickety dentist Bertram is the only human who can observe the somewhat Grant-like Greg Kinnear's recently departed two-timer Frank Herlihy, as well as a whole "Sixth Sense" horde of ghostly others around him.
Why? Bertram actually died briefly (for seven minutes) during an emergency colonoscopy performed by a wacky surgeon (Kristen Wiig) more concerned with her new artificial tan. He survives with the strange new ability to see ghosts that are apparently everywhere around us, all sadly trying to wrap up the unfinished business they left behind on Earth.
Among those is Frank, a suave philanderer who lived in Bertram's building before he met his untimely demise. Frank needs something from the dentist now that he can communicate with the dead - to use Bertram to make sure that his wife, knockout museum archeologist Gwen (played with Carole Lombard-ish sexy pizazz by Tea Leoni) doesn't marry her new fiancé, too-good-to-be-true human rights lawyer Richard (Billy Campbell).
Much as I enjoyed "Ghost Town," I have a problem here - beyond those occasional scenes when Bertram talks to Frank in public and nobody around him reacts.
If Frank so objects to Gwen-and-Richard, why does he promote a second romance between Gwen and Bertram, initially a nasty snob who, in every way, seems a worse choice for her - a man so mean, nasty and dismissive that we start longing for his comeuppance after his first tooth-rattling scene? That comeuppance, and a spiritual awakening, will arrive. But it still makes the Gwen-Bertram romance harder to accept, and not so much because Bertram is plainer-looking, but because he's only really funny here when he's nasty.
Is that a flaw? In a film so bristling with wit, screwball personality, clever twists and autumnal Manhattan beauties, perhaps not.
"Ghost Town"
Three stars
Starring: Greg Kinnear, Ricky Gervais, Tea Leoni, Alan Ruck
Directed by: David Koepp
Other: A Paramount Pictures release. Rated PG-13 for language, drug references, sexual humor. 102 minutes.