WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Films about dead people with unfinished business and living people who see them have one thing in common - the dead just will not shut up.
And that's more than a little annoying, especially when, like "Ghost Town's" Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais), you're not a big fan of live people, either, let alone spirits trying to give you a "To Do" list.
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But on the way to checking tasks off the ghosts' lists, prickly dentist Bertram and the audience both find that life, even the afterlife, is about the journey.
That might sound trite, but the subtly sophisticated and surprisingly emotionally rich "Ghost Town" is anything but. Director David Koepp and his co-screenwriter John Kamps take a concept pretty much exhausted in "The Sixth Sense" and make it sing because they focus on love, loss and regret rather than Halloween parlor-trick spookiness or otherwordly revenge stories.
It's lucky that Gervais is more than able to cut any sweetness with a withering look and a tart comment. You might say that Bertram might be more dead than the actual ghosts, a bitter little man who barely acknowledges other people, including his dentistry partner (Aasif Mandvi), and seems to endure human interaction as a necessary evil until he can cocoon himself in his neat apartment.
He's his regular uncharming self, right up to checking himself into the hospital for a routine colonoscopy. Bertram awakes just as prickly, but eventually finds out from his doctor ("Saturday Night Live's" Kristen Wiig, playing on her usual cluelessly vain persona) that he actually died for seven minutes.
The hospital is insistent on not making a big deal out of this, but Bertram's understandably upset. He's even more upset to discover that his temporary death has made him able to see and communicate with the dead. What's more, they all want favors, which are not usually Bertram's thing.
Still, he becomes the unwilling confidant of Frank (Greg Kinnear), a recently deceased philanderer, who wants Bertram to break up the impending nuptials of his widow Gwen (Tea Leoni) and her intended (a deliciously smug Billy Campbell). It turns out that Gwen is one of the neighbors Bertram's been avoiding, but once he takes a good look at her, he decides to help out.
The outcome of Gwen and Bertram's association isn't a surprise - of course, they become quite fond of each other, which complicates things. The surprise is the tenderness between the two - you can see the worry begin to strip away from Gwen's eyes, and Bertram almost physically unclinch.
Leoni, so over the top and angry as the tightly-wound wife in "Spanglish," plays the complete opposite here, a woman who's so internalized her grief over her husband's death and his betrayal that it's flattened her.
The bigger surprise is Gervais, who we always knew was brilliant at cutting snark, but also is uncommonly good at showing the gushing pain that's calcified inside Bertram, and his desperate fear that opening his heart will tap into that pain.
But the closer he becomes to Gwen, and with the dead, the more alive he risks becoming. Of course, that road to redemption is messy, and it's in those gray areas that "Ghost Town" sparkles.
REVIEW
Ghost Town
A-
Rated PG-13: Strong language, sexual humor, drug references
Run time: 1 hour, 42 minutes
The verdict: A sublimely grown-up, emotionally satisfying about seeing dead people - and then better seeing yourself.
Leslie Gray Streeter writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: lstreeter AT pbpost.com
