Jerry Zucker (1990)

A huge commercial success, this pompous whimsy is an object lesson in understanding your audience and giving it what it wants.  Sam, a young banker who uncovers a money-laundering operation at his place of work, gets bumped off by the swindlers’ hit man then hangs around as a ghost to protect his loving girlfriend Molly from the baddies and bring them to justice (ie violent death followed by exit to hell pursued by menacing black blobs).  Sam gets in touch with Molly through a fake medium who has to come to terms with being the genuine article.  It sounds like a comedy (and is in most of the bits involving the medium) but that’s without reckoning on the supernatural manipulative resourcefulness of the screenwriter, Bruce Joel Rubin, and the director, Jerry Zucker.  Ghost is also a thriller and a moral fable and a swoony, humourless love story with Sam and Molly enjoying plenty of photogenic physical and spiritual contact in life and after his death.  Zucker and Rubin never miss a trick.  For example, Sam announces he’s taking Molly to the theatre to see Macbeth:  no sooner has the spectre of snobby culture raised its ugly head than he reassures us that Molly ‘just likes to see guys wearing tights’.  Sam, as any regular guy should, snores through the performance.  This would be OK in a thoroughly philistine comedy but is harder to stomach in a movie that often takes itself seriously.  And while you might think it a waste of screen time for Sam’s ghost to struggle with the problems of passing through doors and making objects move by telekinetic ‘focus’ (isn’t that expected of screen ghosts?), his painstaking efforts involve special effects – which must be a good thing because it’s a crowd-pleasing thing.

As the hero, Patrick Swayze doesn’t fully convince you that his mind has survived death, which, in this film, appears to mean nothing more than aggravated communication problems.  In this first phase of the afterlife (he goes to heaven once he’s seen Molly right), Sam isn’t endowed with any clairvoyant or telepathic powers.  It takes him ages to realise he can’t be seen or heard and he’s baffled by Molly’s initial scepticism when the medium first goes to her.  (Then, once Molly’s convinced, she’s baffled by the scepticism of others.)  Swayze’s blankness is convenient for the film-makers, however:  you never wonder if Sam’s asking himself any posthumous existential questions because he lacks any evident capacity for thought.  (In retrospect, it seems surprising that Sam could hold down any sort of job in life, let alone root out financial malpractice.)  For much of the film, Demi Moore, as Molly, is strangely muffled:  with her face often photographed in shadow, she seems a less substantial presence than the camera-conscious ghost of Sam.  But Moore gets stronger and her underplaying more appealing; although she’s darkly attractive, it’s a relief that she’s not conventionally pretty (as Patrick Swayze is).  She’s good at getting tears to run down her cheeks.  The lack of imagination in visualising the ghosts makes the scenes in the medium’s quarters, with customers and phantoms jostling for room, merely messy but Whoopi Goldberg’s enthusiastic performance as ‘spiritual advisor’ Oda Mae Brown wins you over.  Oda Mae’s pain at physical separation from a four-million-dollar cheque is far more intense (and funny) than anything to do with Sam and Molly’s loss of each other.

With Tony Goldwyn as the couple’s emphatically shifty best friend (who turns out to be the arch, snivelling villain of the piece).   The score is by Maurice Jarre (he seems to have been possessed by John Williams while writing it) but the Righteous Brothers’ ‘Unchained Melody’ is Ghost’s real theme music and delivers the emotional goods.  Photographed by Adam Greenberg; snappy editing by Walter Murch.

[1990s]