She said: B
Modern women want to have it all: a successful career, a loving partner and a life-resuscitating kiss from Mark Ruffalo.
In "Just Like Heaven," Elizabeth (Reese Witherspoon) is just such a woman. However, as a rising star in the medical field, she finds herself more often in the operating room than in the singles' bar. Poor Elizabeth's love life doesn't get steamy until fate intervenes, placing her body in a coma and her ghost-like spirit in her former apartment, now rented by widowed David (Mark Ruffalo).
Perhaps one should not demand realism from a film that features both ghosts and the star of "Napoleon Dynamite." Nevertheless, it's shocking how well David accepts the entrance of ghostly Elizabeth into his apartment and into his life. As it turns out, this fiery blonde physician is not only undead, but is also experiencing a sort of amnesia precluding her from remembering her former life. Thus, with only an address, a dry cleaning ticket and a book of matches, Elizabeth and David set out on an epic quest.
And quite a quest it is. A promising clue about her past prompts Elizabeth to this startling insight: "I may have been a lonely, home-wrecking whore, but I saved lives." Fortunately for Elizabeth, only the latter half of this statement is true. Between David's impromptu surgery in a restaurant, involving only a knife and a bottle of vodka, and the sage wisdom of occult bookshop employee Darryl (Jon Heder of "Napoleon Dynamite"), Elizabeth realizes her former career-centric ways: "I saved my life - for later."
"Just Like Heaven," unlike The Cure song that is its namesake, is hardly morose. With the aid of a troublesome ring on the mahogany coffee table courtesy of semi-alcoholic David, this unlikely pairing of ghost and widow are able to look past Elizabeth's comatose state and fall in love. Predictability abounds in this cute, disposable tale, and this is how it should be. This movie is simply a romantic comedy; considering it often lacks the comedic element, it is appropriate that the romance is especially prevalent.
- MIA STEINLE
He said: B-
All he wanted was a couch, but he got so much more.
In Mark Waters' romantic comedy "Just Like Heaven," Mark Ruffalo plays the handsome but rough-around-the-edges David Abbott, still reeling from the death of his wife two years before, and finding solace in can after can of cheap beer. David, guided by the hands of fate, moves into the apartment of comatose Elizabeth (Reese Witherspoon), and finds himself haunted by her ghost. "Spinning on that dizzy edge between this world and the next," Elizabeth remembers little from her waking life, and it is up to David to help her find her past, and incidentally, her body.
Only when Elizabeth is disconnected from her body can she romantically connect to another person. A workaholic before her debilitating car accident, Elizabeth's friends and family have little emotional connection to her, and her neighbors hardly remember that she ever lived in the now haunted apartment. But in her ethereal state, she finally begins to take down the walls she built up around herself, which barred her from intimate relations. She provides the impetus for David to move on from his late wife and start living life again.
They are two halves that make a whole: one physically separated from the world by death, one emotionally distanced from those around him by the death of his wife. As they cope with personal losses with the help of each other, they begin to enjoy and treasure life as well as the other's company.
Waters tries to sell the film as a dark comedy, a love affair between damaged goods. But the film is entirely too sweet for any comparisons with anything darker than "Legally Blonde," save the funniest scene, which involves body snatching.
So sure, it isn't original, and it isn't especially clever, and it is far from the dark humor that Waters was reaching for. But it is endearing. There are some lines that are sweet enough to make teeth fall out in the theater, but there is comfort in the surreal. Everyone will melt a little when Witherspoon says, "I know what my unfinished business is. You."
- JEFF LAMBERT
