It’s interesting that Ghost Town is released the same day as Lakeview Terrace.  At first blush, they couldn’t seem more disparate.  One is a taut thriller mining the depths racial tension and the other is a romantic comedy.  But if you look deeper you’ll see that one is directed someone (Neil LaBute) who has made a career out of creating uncomfortable films that make people mad while the other stars someone (Ricky Gervais) who has made a career of out creating uncomfortable situations that make people laugh.

Ricky Gervais (best known for creating and starring in the British version of The Office) plays Bertram Pincus, a dentist that lives a solitary live and prefers it that way.  He has a tendency towards casual cruelty.  He has little interest in other people and even less interest in their lives or feelings.  After being placed under general anesthesia for a colonoscopy, he dies.  He is revived after seven minutes.  However, his brush with death enables him to see the ghosts that inhabit New York while they’re waiting to “move on”.  He is quickly intercepted by Frank Herlihy (played by Greg Kinnear).  Frank, while alive, had been an adulterous husband.  He’s now looking to make up for that by stopping his wife from marrying a ne're-do-well.  But his attempts have been ineffectual, what with being a ghost and all.  Which is where Pincus comes in.  Pincus, as you can guess, isn’t overly concerned with Frank’s problems.  But after seeing Frank’s wife, he changes his mind in the hopes that he can stop the marriage and win her over in one fell swoop.

Gervais gives a dry but winning performance as Pincus.  He’s mean but remains oddly likeable.  Unfortunately as he gets nicer, the laughs can get a little sparse.  On the upside, by this time we’re so caught up in the characters that we don’t really mind.

Kinnear is likeable as a charming, albeit slightly smarmy, ghost.  And, as a side note, is there a more surprising actor to come along in the last ten years?  Who’d have thought a basic cable would have produced such a person.  It’s interesting that he started as talk show host.  Johnny Carson was wildly praised for being smart enough to know that if he made his guests look good he, in turn, would look good too.  It’s a good lesson for a talk show host and Kinnear seems to have carried that way of thinking over to his acting. 

Ghost Town is a charming little film that slowly wins over the audience.  It doesn’t have the “huge comedic set-piece” that we often get in comedies these days.  There isn’t the “hair gel” moment of There’s Something About Mary or the “pie scene” of American Pie.  For the last decade or so, many of Hollywood’s biggest comedies have felt like they wrote the big jokes first and then grafted them on to whatever movie they were making that week.  Sometimes that works but more often than not, it doesn’t.  Here we get a movie that *gasp* derives its humor from its characters.  None of these jokes were pre-written. 

While the story is fairly rudimentary, it’s elevated by its cast.  The rapport between Gervais and Kinnear is stellar.  And Gervais’ frustration with people that simply want to be polite is harvested for solid laughs.  In the third act, when the movie focuses on some of the other ghosts haunting New York, it deftly walks that line between being sentimental and being treacly. 

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Topper and 1 being Two of a Kind, Ghost Town gets an 8.