Just Like Heaven

Not bad, but it haunts for other reasons...

Official Just Like Heaven Site
Romantic Comedy
Starring Reese Witherspoon, Mark Ruffalo, Jon Heder
Rated PG-13 (for language and sexual situations)
Running Time: 95 Minutes
Released:September 16th, 2005


2 Out Of 5 Bites


In a market presently devoid of romantic comedies, Just Like Heaven will manage to pull its own weight. Now, it isn't a totally dead weight, mind you, but it does have trouble getting a grip on itself.

Reese Witherspoon (Elizabeth) and Mark Ruffalo (David) manage a sustainable- if not likeable- rapport together. Unfortunately, it is much too late in the film. She's a too-busy-to-have-a-life doctor striving for an attending physician's spot at her hospital. In this one day, she lands the position. And just before her overworked, under-socialized self can meet up with the nice man at the dinner party sponsored by her equally-as-frazzled sister, she piles head-first into a truck and voila, we have our ghost....sort of.

He's a bummed-out shell of a man, trying to hang on in an obvious cloud of despair. Moping around his new apartment while consistently clutching a brew, David encounters Elizabeth's spirit, who still thinks she's alive. From here, much time will be spent on the ways one or the other or both will try to: 1) convince her she's dead; 2) get each other out of the house; 3) find out why she's dead and who she is. The emotional connection that the two forge in the process feels like an afterthought, but seems forgivable since you know it will happen. Whether or not it is forgivable is another issue when considering the haste the movie made to get there. Ruffalo is often forced into comic parameters that don't time very well with his strained, but even keel, which for him, has been a trait of endearment (as in 13 Going On 30). In his proper flow and element aided by his requisite puppy-doggishness, he can be quite decent.

Suffice it to say that director Mark Waters and writers Peter Tolan and Leslie Dixon are not conclusively saying Heaven is what the afterlife is like. But some things may not work for the audience as it does for the story. If Elizabeth is so unconvinced of her own spectral status, how is it that falling out of a window only to instantly reappear behind David is not an existential proof for her doctorly mind that such a feat may be reserved for the otherworldly? Why does her shadow and reflection exist? Why can't she grab a phone but her bed indents when she is upon it? Perhaps Waters, et al, are convinced that a relatively unsophisticated audience won't be as attentive on these foibles, especially if there's a significant other to be ogled later in the adjoining seat.

And the worn images and soundbites of the Terry Schiavo case must certainly haunt the minds of some who partake in the film. It is no small feat to have assuaged the tenderness of that whole episode and to transfix an audience toward the comical around this issue. The comic relevance here waxes more tragic wherein the media bombardment of the Schiavo case may have produced a weary resistance to its central concerns. Maybe, the producers are just masters of timing.

Witherspoon seems to avert the inane premises and raises herself to the Sweet-Home-Alabama-ish chipper and charming sweet pot of a girl she can be, but she only flies well below the actress she really is and can be (as in her first comic winner, Election).

Jon Heder- as the floaty mediumistic adviser- would have been a riot, but anyone who has seen Napoleon Dynamite surely caught the Napoleon-esque mannerisms....the squint, the mouth agape, etc. This connection dulled his comic edge and reduces his significance to mostly un-funny one-liners. I felt compelled to laugh at him because I remembered him as Mr. Dynamite.

However, Heaven will pass on, perhaps immemorial to newly post-pubescent girls drawn to the workable, chitty-chatty allure of Witherspoon and the cuddly Ruffalo, but not for those weary from re-hashed, re-worked resurrections of ghosty movies past. Especially those films begging for fresh vision and wearing out a welcome in a genre with such well-known and predictable type-scenes.