GHOST TOWN

I needed some comic relief from recent events so I took my little guy to see GHOST TOWN.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved almost any movie that had ghosts or spirits in them.

And I love romantic movies too, that work—at least for me.

So I’m a sucker for movies that do both.

I even liked GHOST, which most people I know can’t stand, or can only admit they like Whoppi Goldberg’s performance in. But I dug everyone in it, including Demi Moore and the much-parodied pot-throwing scene.

So, it should have been easy for me to love GHOST TOWN, the latest entry in this genre.

But I wasn’t sure I would. And well into it I was still wondering. Because even though I love everything I’ve ever seen Tea Leoni or Greg Kennear in, because they are both such good actors, especially able to draw pathos from comedy and vice versa, and I appreciate Ricky Gervais’s comic talent, ultimately I find it difficult to watch him.

I had trouble watching the original British THE OFFICE as well as his HBO series EXTRAS, for the same reason I rarely watch sitcoms.

Because when something totally embarrassing happens—no matter how obviously meant to be funny or lead into something funny, or how well resolved—I get so uncomfortable I have to leave the room.

For a guy who’s done his share of embarrassing behavior, you’d think it might be cathartic, or at least a small relief to see my own foibles shared. But that’s not usually the case, because the kind of behavior I’m talking about most people could see coming a mile away and avoid it, even me, or at least regret it later.

No, Gervais’s character on EXTRAS was so blindly unaware of other peoples’ feelings most of the time, it led to behavior that, though seemingly funny to a lot of folks, I usually found so thoughtlessly dumb, it embarrassed me too much to watch.

That’s how GHOST TOWN struck me in the early scenes, watching Gervais’s dentist go through his self-pitying self-centered day. There was a note of sympathy evoked for what was portrayed as a pathetically lonely man—which of course telegraphed the eventual resolution from the first moment—but that wasn’t enough to overcome the general dislike Gervais was seemingly deliberately creating for his character (yes as crucial to the story, but think of all the great actors, comedic and otherwise, who make us fall for them immediately no matter how bad or base the characters they’re playing might be).

Even when the ending is pretty much a given, how a movie gets to it is the mark of whether it’s any good or not. That’s mostly dependent on the writing (in this case the director David Koepp with the help of John Kamps) and how well the actors execute it.

Having Greg Kennear and Tea Leoni acting out your words and plot pretty much guarantees I’m gonna enjoy watching it, no matter how dismissible or unmemorable it might become in hindsight. But Gervais was the problem for this viewer.

Especially since I was so looking forward to the interaction between the ghosts and the live characters and it wasn’t happening quickly enough—or just plain enough—to satisfy the little kid in me (and maybe because I was watching it with my own little kid).

But after the set up extended too long for my taste, it finally started to pay dividends (if that isn’t too sensitive a metaphor to use these days) when Kennear’s and Leoni’s characters became a more integral part of the story.

From then on I was hooked, and by the end of the movie, Ricky Gervais had made me stop squirming and I’d surrendered to his “comedic” tics, used here for more dramatic effect, and left the theater having laughed a lot and even dropped a few tears, with another movie to add to any list of romantic/ghost stories.

And wondering if Gervais fans will be disappointed in his obvious surrender to a classic Hollywood kind of movie sentimentality and a more heart-warming take on reality than he usually offers in his TV personas (except for a few contemporary touches, like Aasif Mandri as Gervais’ character’s Hindu dentist partner, this flick could have been made by a Hollywood studio in the 1940s).

You Gervais fans out there, let me know.