"Ghost Town"

Ghost Town ***½

Ghost Town is a lovely little movie—the perfect trifle for an early autumn day.
In many ways, it’s nothing new under the sun: yet another narrative about the afterlife in which death’s lost souls hunger for resolution with their loved ones who languish back in the land of the living. A vastly similar plot device acted as the engine for Ghost and Field of Dreams.
David Koepp’s Ghost Town takes precious few liberties with this tried-and-true formula. But that’s okay—he’s got something else on his side. He has British comedian Ricky Gervais in his corner.
You probably know Gervais from the British version of television’s The Office, which he created and for which he starred as David Brent, the brashly uncouth manager who took self-indulgence and smarminess to new levels of deplorability.
In Ghost Town, Gervais plays Bertram Pincus, a friendless, socially inept New York City dentist. Pincus will stop at nothing to avoid human interaction. In one memorable scene, a simple office party has him running for the exits.
Pincus’s life is thrown into disarray after he undergoes a routine medical procedure. During the operation, Pincus dies on the table for some seven minutes, only to be revived in the nick of time. When Pincus leaves the hospital, he suddenly finds himself in a world populated by the living and the deceased alike.
That’s right: he can see dead people. And they’re everywhere, begging Pincus—as their only conduit to the corporeal world—to assist them in ministering to the pain and uncertainty of their survivors. As you might imagine, this is a terrible predicament indeed for an inveterate loner like Pincus.
But then the late Frank Herlihy (Greg Kinnear) arrives on the scene, and Pincus discovers that he can no longer look away. A two-timing, self-centered husband, Frank is the anti-Pincus. Elite, handsome, and debonair, he exists as Pincus’s polar opposite—except that he’s dead, of course.
Frank’s untimely death has left his widow, Gwen (Tea Leoni), to pick up the pieces of her life in her unfathomable grief. And, like every other dead person in Manhattan, Frank desperately hopes that, with Pincus’s earthly assistance, he can communicate with his loved one and ease her pain.
If nothing else, it’s the ideal setup for a movie that implicitly understands its place in the cinematic solar system. Ghost Town wants to make us laugh and smile. And I am happy to report that it does so—on both accounts—to seeming perfection.