Not surprisingly for so highly visual and realistic a medium, the
movies generally take a pretty dim view of God. As the great hymn
of Walter Chalmers Smith puts it,
Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes…
Not much use then, is He, to those who are in the business of
marketing things that are very much not hid from our
eyes but, rather, vividly present to them? Yet, as if to make up
for the Deity’s lack of screen chemistry, the movies have always
been nuts about ghosts. They’re sort of invisible too, of course,
drifting around at night just out of sight as pale splodges of
diaphanous material and rather shy about more public
manifestations in movies that try to keep the scary things out of
sight until needed. But in non-scary movies they can also be
visible as immaterial versions of their living selves. In this
state, they are visible only to — well, whom? Anyone Hollywood
wants them to be visible to, that’s whom. And those gifted with
the strange and uncanny ability to see them will always include
the movie audience.
Another great thing about ghosts is that they bring with them a
whole mystic cosmology which it is the privilege, nay the duty,
of the movie-makers to invent. Since no one knows anything about
ghosts for real, even whether or not they exist, once you posit
their existence, you have to devote a good third of your movie
just to explaining the lore of ghosts and your answer to the
question that is unfailingly interesting to everybody — namely,
what happens to you after you die? For example, in Ghost
Town, directed by David Koepp and written by him in
collaboration with John Kamps, we learn, among other things, that
ghosts can be seen and even familiarly conversed with by those
who have suffered clinical death and then been resuscitated, that
they appear in whatever they were wearing when they die, that
they cause the living to sneeze when we walk through them and,
above all, that they are only the dead people with urgent
unfinished business on earth. The rest have gone on to, well,
some place in the sky where they become as invisible as God is.
The great virtue of the movie is that the guy who sees dead
people in it, Bertram Pincus, D.D.S., is played by the great
Ricky Gervais in his first leading role in a feature film. There
are also good things to be said about the performances of Greg
Kinnear as the main ghost he sees and Tea Leoni as the ghost’s
widow whose contemplated re-marriage he makes it his urgent
unfinished business to prevent — with the help of Dr. Pincus.
But Mr. Gervais’s performance is what makes the movie worth
seeing. His character is a bit like that of David Brent in the
British version of The Office, a role that he
originated, only without the social skills and the easy-going
bonhomie. He is, in other words, a recluse and a misanthrope who
feels entitled to live a life of completely asocial selfishness
because his heart was broken, apparently some years previously,
by a woman. As in all the best ghost movies, the purpose of his
intercourse with the spirit world is to teach him — and us —
how to live and love in this one. Somehow, a seeming banality
like “only a life lived for others is worth living” becomes
almost a profundity when put into perspective by the dead, for
whom living any kind of life is no longer an option.
To me it is surprising, to say the least, that so worldly an
ironist as Ricky Gervais should have chosen such a role and that,
having chosen it, he should have done it so persuasively. It’s
true that even he can’t quite bring off the moment of
peripeteia, when the selfish bastard suddenly becomes a
philanthropist. He turns this weakness in the script, like most
other things, into a joke by saying: “This business of being such
a f****** p**** — what is it really getting me?” But I’ve always
thought that a film-maker should be entitled to one unexplained
— or inadequately explained — character transformation if it
really helps the plot along, as it undoubtedly does here. It may
be a pretty cheap way of stirring the emotions, but there’s not
that much even of classic Hollywood which doesn’t depend on more
or less cheap ways of stirring the emotions.
