Death Warmed Over
If you’re a character in a movie, and the rain is coming down so heavily that you cannot see through your car’s windshield, for the love of God, don’t drive! Truck drivers will assume in such conditions that honking their horn provides ample warning before plowing into you and knocking you into a coma or, maybe, the afterlife.
Reese Witherspoon, as Elizabeth, is the victim of such an event in Just Like Heaven. She’s on her way to meet a prospective blind date when the thing with the truck happens, and suddenly the movie starts telling us a new story, that of a widower named David (Mark Ruffalo) who wants nothing more than to rent a San Francisco apartment with a comfy couch. But you know those San Franciscans — always with the weird feng-shui stuff, or the sculptures of naked butts uncomfortably placed in one’s field of vision. So David can’t find a “normal” place, until a flier literally slaps him in the face and he soon finds himself on a couch drinking beer and watching sports, because men do that sometimes.
Then Elizabeth suddenly shows up to yell at him, claiming that it’s her apartment. Before David can debate the issue, she disappears, re-materializing at inopportune times — the script endlessly milks the joke of him “seeing someone new.” So David calls an exorcist, Chinese medicine specialists, even Ghostbusters. (The film’s DreamWorks-Spielberg connection allows for the use of the actual 1984 movie song, though, alas, no Bill Murray.) Only when all of those fail does he turn to Napoleon Dynamite himself, Jon Heder, sporting Beck’s hairdo and running an “occult and metaphysical” bookstore. Napoleon, er, Daryl decides that Elizabeth’s is the most alive spirit he’s ever encountered and suggests that she may not really be dead.
Director Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) and screenwriters Peter Tolan (Analyze This) and Leslie Dixon (also of Freaky Friday) manage to choreograph much amusing banter between their leads. Witherspoon and Ruffalo are likable actors, and Waters’ wife, Dina, playing Elizabeth’s neurotic sister, proves adept at physical and emotional comedy, deftly blocking the assaults of her character’s children while sympathetically and amusingly portraying a grieving sibling. Unfortunately, though, the movie fails to fully make sense, which may be because it’s based on a French novel (If Only It Were True by Marc Levy). The ultimate circumstances of Elizabeth’s fate, and their bearing on why David can see her when no one else can, are hardly explained, except for some perfunctory claptrap about soul mates and destiny. Freaky Friday at least gave us a magic fortune cookie; here, there’s no equivalent.
Given the positive crowd response to Just Like Heaven, it’s hard to beat up on it too much, but it’s the least of Waters’ films, and the ending is painfully drawn out in a way that hurts the overall impact. And let’s take a shot at the soundtrack, too. Bad covers of the titular Cure song and Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life,” among others, seem like cheap shortcuts. If you can afford the Ghostbusters music, go the whole nine yards.
