Review: Just Like Heaven

While you, the casual moviegoer, may often wonder why Reese Witherspoon is a star, you only need look at how many women's magazines her sunny face graces to understand the demographic appeal. That said, the Legally Blonde star's latest custom ride is -- well, your Mom will like it, anyway, despite the fact that it's not much to speak of.

Witherspoon plays a driven MD with no social life…until one day a car crash separates her body from her spirit…which ends up back at her apartment…which her sister has sublet to a grieving, puppy-doggish landscape architect…played by indie crossover heartthrob Mark Ruffalo! Naturally, the two mismatched and reluctant roommates butt heads (mostly because he is a slob who kills his pain with booze like all men do) -- and fall in love. At least we're meant to believe they fall in love. That's where the movie falls short (or falls the shortest).

Director Mark Waters, who showed a far keener hand in the snarky teen comedy Mean Girls, seems to be going for the kind of existential heft of Ghost – completely forgetting the fact that classic gems like A Guy Named Joe and Topper did this sort of thing to near-perfection. With the excessive slapstick (and the fact that his main character is actually in a coma), it instead brings to mind Bill Cosby's Ghost Dad [insert punctuating "wah-wah" trumpet sound here]. As schmaltzy as Ghost may have been ("Unchained Melody" still incites me to violence), it did manage to create that essential suspension of disbelief (in which ghosts were really real and Patrick Swayze could act). In Just Like Heaven, though, the only thing I was completely sure of is that after the show, the parking attendant would ask me for $10. I felt kind of the same way after the meta-fizzical hypothesis, What Dreams May Come, but at least that looked real purdy and had a nice soundtrack.

The whole affair has an all-too-convenient Harlequin romance feel to it (although the part of the grieving widower on the book cover would have big Fabio man-teats). I can imagine the pitch meeting, with the producers explaining the intricacies of  Marc Levy's book to the money guys: "You see, by giving in to his relationship with the girl who is not really alive, he himself learns to live again." Then, the producers would explain the dramatic irony of such a scenario, after, of course, explaining to them what dramatic irony is.

Witherspoon's character is such an obsessive little twerp, and it's difficult to believe why anyone would want to date her, other than the fact that there's a certain plain cuteness to her. It's a bit like risking hepatitis just so you can claim you slept with Pamela Anderson -- it's hardly worth the payoff. Your like of the movie really depends on her appeal to you, and she doesn't really offer much of her "It Girl" sparkle here to win over first-timers, despite the fact that she is paid something like $15 million a picture. Ruffalo's character is no prize, either. I know that chicks dig this guy, who played the helpless slouch so well in You Can Count On Me, but do his good looks buy him a pass when he makes forgettable fluff like this? Tom Cruise has built a career on it, so I guess the answer is yes. Here, he stumbles around with that "dead wife, sad life" affectation, playing it with little nuance. I sympathize with anyone who has endured such a terrible loss, but every time I would watch the guy stew in his own misery, I kept hearing my high school gym teacher's ever-helpful (but not very sensitive) words of wisdom: "Get over it, Alice!"

Okay, there was one bit that got me, but I'm a sucker for this sort of thing. Just as Witherspoon is slipping away (and they telegraph from the start that her getting back into her body is going to be a race against time), I did get that proto-lump in the throat. Of course, being the suckers we are, we fall for it too often, even though we know that they will come back to life, brain death or logic be damned. Remember Disney's Beauty and the Beast when the big talking dog-man bought it and you thought for a split-second that he was really dead? It's kind of like that. But maybe that's just my own abandonment issues at play.

Further thickening this hodgepodge of clichés and coulda-beens is Jon Heder, phoning in a stoner version of his terribly grating and unfunny Napoleon Dynamite character, which, as any kid will tell you, was "righteous!" Why people have latched on to that überhip snoozefest with such disciple-like glee continues to escape me, though at least since it came out, fewer people do wretched Austin Powers imitations, which decreases Planet Earth's stupid quotient somewhat. Here, Heder (who has no fewer than six projects in queue for the coming year) plays an oh-so-wise occult book store employee with all the answers (the words you're looking for are "deus ex machina"). He speaks very matter-of-factly about the kinds of supernatural things that defined the world of Ghostbusters, but here it comes off as just a silly gimmick in search of a story. Calling him a scene stealer may seem like a compliment, but anytime anyone has ever stolen anything from me, it was disruptive, and like here, pissed me off. Dina Waters, who is the director's wife, is nonetheless pretty well-cast as Witherspoon's sister (her first scene is a grabber that the rest of the movie can't live up to), and Grounded For Life refugee Donal Logue is pretty sharp as Ruffalo's cool-handed best friend/womanizing psychiatrist. However, they are standouts in an otherwise standard effort which, unlike its title suggests, is far from perfection.