Most of the time, if I say the first twenty minutes of a film were the best, and it all went downhill from there, I mean that the movie was bad. Not so here. Ghost Town started at such a high point that downhill is still pretty good. The first twenty minutes are some of the funniest I have ever seen – somehow even the opening credits of dental equipment were funny to me. (Why are plaster teeth molds funny? Not sure, but they are.) Those first twenty minutes confirm for me that Ricky Gervais may be the funniest man alive. His plays a misanthropic dentist, who seems to like his profession because it means he can stuff people’s mouths with cotton when he’s tired of listening to them. Any introvert will cringe with recognition at his desire to avoid human contact to the point of being rude. (Really, who hasn’t let those elevator doors close so you don’t have to ride with someone?)
Basically, Gervais’s character, Bertram Pincus, can see dead people because he “dies” for seven minutes during a routine colonoscopy. His discovery of this ability, and the reason for it, are truly brilliant, and Kristen Wiig (of SNL) has never been as hilarious as she is playing the surgeon who operated on him. Greg Kinnear plays Frank Herlihy, one of these ghosts, and he somehow hits a perfect note of charming and sleazy. Frank claims to have unfinished business that consists of breaking up his widow’s impending marriage, and annoys Bertram until he agrees to help. Of course, in so doing, Bertram ends up falling in love with the wife (Tea Leoni).
Thus begins the second part of the story, which is slightly less funny than the first part. Pincus cracks jokes with the widow, and Gervais is a genuinely good joke teller. He’s funny, but it’s no longer as heartbreakingly hilarious. Misanthropic avoidance of people was better than cracking jokes about how funny Chinese names are.
The third and last part of the movie is the weakest, but it’s still satisfactory. In the end, you have to get rid of some of these ghosts, which means Bertram Pincus must eventually crack and be a passably good guy. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – I actually did want his character to grow, unlike Roger Ebert – the movie just folds and ties up loose ends. This leads to some saccharin moments, and the main “revelation” of the movie about the nature of ghosts isn’t actually that spectacular. But since we do hope for a happy ending, which is a hard note to hit in a story about dead people and misanthropes, the fact that it didn’t come off as totally unpalatable is pretty impressive.
But if you don’t like the sugary ending, and find yourself missing the brilliant acidity of Bertram Pincus before he had a change of heart, I suggest you do what I did: after watching, just go back and watch those first twenty minutes again.
