Ricky Gervais is not the typical romantic lead. His hair is floppy and unassuming, he is round around the edges, and his smile lacks natural charisma. Yet despite all this, in Ghost Town, you end up falling in love with him right along with Gwen (Téa Leoni). His hair and his mannerisms suddenly start to remind you of an adorably awkward puppy, and even the dentistry humor he spouts with a straight face and earnest eyes begins to warm the cockles of your heart.
As Bertram Pincus (with a name like that, one is just destined to be unpleasant), Gervais plays an antisocial curmudgeon. His supposedly contemptible actions at the start of the film are not that appalling, or even that funny; they’re common actions that you could see anywhere on the streets of New York City—stealing someone’s cab, not holding the elevator open, or refusing to respond when someone smiles and says hello to you.
Fortunately, the malcontented Bertram Pincus does not remain on screen for long. Shortly after the film opens, he has a vague and unexplained accident with laxatives, and is clinically dead on the operating table for seven minutes. The unintended side effect of his surgical mishap is that Pincus can now see the ghosts roaming New York City, and they’re “just as loud and pushy as they were when they were alive.”
This plot device yields many a gimmicky and flat joke, like the superfluous moments when Pincus is speaking to the ghosts but looks like he’s speaking to himself, or when people sneeze because ghosts are passing through them. In this world, ghosts always wear what they died in, which serves the double purpose of saving on costume costs and allowing for the requisite naked guy jokes (although the goods are kept hidden through editing to maintain a PG-13 rating).
Those expecting Gervais’ trademark dry humor and expert deadpan delivery will be sorely disappointed by the comedy in Ghost Town, as Gervais had no part in the script that was penned by David Koepp and John Kamps. Given that Koepp is of Mission Impossible and Spiderman fame, and Kamps is most known for his work on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie and Zathura: A Space Adventure, it is astounding that the jokes work at all. Indeed, the funniest moments are when Gervais is allowed to adlib and goes on rambling monologues.
Although marketed as a comedy, Ghost Town is really just an old-fashioned romance. While the gimmick of seeing ghosts is what brings Pincus and Gwen together, after their meeting the film turns earnest and sincere. Gervais and Leoni portray the rarest of all movie characters: two average, middle-aged people who fall in love without plot manipulation or ridiculous devices. They have realistic occupations, lead ordinary lives, and show just the typical amount of eccentricity, and that is what makes their romance so captivating. Gwen has no misconceptions about who Pincus is, and in case anyone forgets, he wears his dentist scrubs for most of the film. Yet despite how unglamorous and uncharismatic Pincus is compared to his romantic rivals in the film, Gwen and the audience still end up under the spell of his natural wit.
While the film’s emotional course is predictable, the journey is far from formulaic due to the fantastic performances by both leads. Leoni has the most amazingly transparent face; you can see every thought and emotion that flickers across her mind and she delivers the most poignant moments in the film. She is the one who makes the romance believable as you watch her perception of Pincus change, viewing him first as an irritant, then a kindred spirit, and finally a love interest. Leoni’s emotional close-ups are a force to be reckoned with, as very few actresses are willing to let the camera get that close or are able to pull off a genuinely complex array of emotions at once.
Gervais’ performance, however, is a legitimate surprise. I have never seen him portray a character without deliberately seeming like a caricature (be it of himself or someone else) or act so honest and vulnerable. In Ghost Town, Gervais exposes his soft side that lies hidden beneath his constant sardonic humor. He proves himself not only to be a serious actor, but a good one at that. Most of the weight of the film, whether it is dramatic or comedic, rests on Gervais’s shoulders, and he executes it all with surprising grace and realism.
Even though Ghost Town is not entirely successful as a comedy, the no-frills romance between the two leads evokes classic cinema where the focus is not on the gimmicks or the pratfalls, but on the dialogue, subtle glances, and little shocks of chemistry that ultimately lead to love.
