Imagine combining the supernatural aura of Ghost with the masked desire of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Now subtract quality, ingenuity and candor. The romantic comedy Just Like Heaven, starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo, is the result.
Meet Elizabeth, a feisty spirit whose body is stuck in a coma following a car accident and whose soul remains trapped in a supernatural state between life and death. Before the accident, Elizabeth was a workaholic doctor with a barren love life -- or, as her sultry neighbor notes, "a cat lady with no cats."
Now, she's back and can walk through tables and vanish into thin air. In fact, she doesn't quite realize her ghastly state -- until she finds the only earthling who can see and hear her.
Meet David, a melancholy, beer-guzzling widower living in Elizabeth's old apartment, leaving crumbs of Cheetos and water rings on her coffee table. His existence is a lethargic loneliness. Clearly, they are a match made in heaven.
Unfortunately, the audience is made to witness the evolution of their relationship.
After her delicious performance as the sinister Tracey Flick in Election, Witherspoon proved in Legally Blond that she can pull off cotton-candy comedy with flair. Here, her persona fluctuates between an endearing heroine who needs the elixir of true love and that of a grating ghost who polices everything from David's alcohol consumption to his sex life. The confines of Elizabeth's character squelch Witherspoon's comedic capabilities.
Likewise, Ruffalo fails to translate into the lackadaisical language of Just Like Heaven. One almost winces while watching him navigate the slippery slopes of hackneyed lines and banal revelations such as, "I was dead and you brought me back to life -- now I'll save you." Ruffalo's bucolic and earthy brooding belongs in dark, fertile dramas such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or You Can Count On Me -- pretty much anywhere but here.
In a film that suffers from suffocating predictability, a few breaths of fresh air redeem certain moments. Jon Heder (yes, the eccentric, liger-loving Napoleon Dynamite) manages to resuscitate two or three scenes. As a zoned-out alternative bookstore employee, Heder's character has "the gift" and serves as the psychic medium for Elizabeth and David's romance status.
Also, the scene in which the medical-savvy Elizabeth instructs the lumbering David on how to save an unconscious man with a vodka bottle and a knife merits a chuckle for its sheer physical comedy.
A more appropriate title for this tepid flick may have been Just Like Limbo. Out of their more natural and darker elements, the otherwise stellar leads fail to resurrect a comatose script. The film vacillates between halfhearted comedy and grandiose statements about love and the connection of human spirits. It is a portrait of celestial mediocrity at its worst, and no amount of prayer or divine intervention could change that.
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