Review: "Ghost Town"

Ghost Town (PG-13)

This is one we can sum up in one line: W.C. Fields meets Ebenezer Scrooge and hold the Holiday part. The tag line for the film is, “He sees dead people…and they annoy him.” And by the way, the living annoy him too.

Greg Kinnear is Frank our combination Jacob Marley/Ghost of Christmas Present. Frank’s been caught cheating on his wife but before he knows how much she knows, Frank catches a bus…or you could more accurately say the bus catches Frank. This is how we meet Frank’s ghost.

Ricky Gervais is a dentist named Bertram Pincus who chose his profession because, “90% of the people I come in contact with have cotton wool stuffed in their mouth.” Bertram also died, while having a colonoscopy or something equally enchanting, but for just under seven minutes. As a result, he sees dead people. Turns out New York, where the film is set, is lousy with ghosts who are there because of unfinished business. Suddenly Bertram can see them, hear them and, they hope, help them.

Frank’s ghost manages to get more or less exclusive access to Bertram so that he can torpedo the engagement of Frank’s widow Gwen (Tea Leoni). Bertram, once he notices Gwen, is quite taken with her although she plans to marry Richard (Bill Campbell) an attorney so righteous you want to him to lose the girl.

Although Gwen’s familiar with Bertram from his not holding elevators for her, stealing cabs she has hailed and generally being a Fieldsian misanthropic jerk, she does find that he makes her laugh and she likes that. But there’s lingering tension for a couple of reasons. One, first impressions (Bertram really is a jerk remember) never really go away. Two, Frank never really goes away either although Gwen doesn’t know he’s there.

The moment of Christmas Future comes from Bertram’s associate in the Dental Office. Dr. Prashar (Aasif Mandvi) tries to get along with Pincus because Prashar’s a nice guy but after exchanges like one where Bertram asks him, “How would you extract information from a hostile?” even the patient dentist from India loses patience. He advises Pincus, “…this business of being such a fucking prick, what is it getting [you].”

Gervais is a delightfully consistent cur and his eventual transformation does make sense in a way that Scrooge’s never did for me. Maybe because Tea Leoni is cuter than any of Dickens’s ghosts and Bertram’s desolate smallness is worth giving up for her. Greg Kinnear is charmingly and unapologetically smarmy. You can see where this particular brand of low-life would be appealing.

Co-writer and director David Koepp has some impressively varied screenplays to his credit but brought a nice touch with some interesting twists to a romantic comedy that really is a comedy without having to resort to slapstick. Maybe he should team up again with Ricky and remake Fields’s classic, “Mississippi.” He’d make an interesting Commodore Jackson.