n apartment with a bay view is hard to get in San Francisco, so when a young professional woman named Elizabeth (Witherspoon) and a depressed loner named David (Ruffalo) both find they've rented the same great apartment, fireworks will naturally erupt. However, it turns out that David is the only person who can see his mysterious co-tenant, and on top of that, she's insistent that she's not dead.
Frustrated with this irritating specter in his new apartment, David hires a Catholic priest, some ghost hunters and other psychics to try to eradicate Elizabeth from his place. She pops in and out of the apartment, walks through walls and furniture, and is as bewildered about the situation as he is.
Elizabeth is a doctor who puts her personal life on hold as she dives into work. Her meddling older sister (Waters) tries setting her up on a blind date, and she seems to remember getting into a car accident, but that's all she can recall until she meets David in her apartment.
Meanwhile, David thinks he's going crazy and seeks advice from his best friend, a wacky psychiatrist (Logue). The doc is caring and smart, but also a hard-drinking womanizer who gives pearls of wisdom like "God gave man alcohol to make women loose."
When counseling and exorcisms don't help, David seeks the advice of Darryl (Heder), a sage slacker manager of a psychic bookstore who seems to be the only other person who senses Elizabeth's presence. David decides to go to Elizabeth's family to find out what exactly is going on, and find out why he got such a good deal on the apartment.
Along the way, he meets Elizabeth's archrival (Shenkman) at the hospital and uncovers some frightening truths that seem to go beyond life and death.
A romantic fantastic comedy
Leave it to Reese to uncover a script that could be the modern-day version of Ghost—which, in case you forgot, was nominated as a Best Picture and won Whoopi Goldberg an Oscar. It's romantic, funny and poignant, without going too far into the schmaltz that so many romances resort to most of the time.
Director Waters has a great sense of inside humor. He not only references The Exorcist, Ghostbusters and Ghost, he even pokes at his own movie (the remake of Freaky Friday) when he has an Asian spiritualist perform an exorcism ritual in David's apartment. That is Lucille Soong, the same actress who played the psychic old Chinese woman who cast the spell in Freaky Friday.
Supporting cast members all have their stellar moments to shine—the real estate agent, the other doctors and even the sexy neighbor (Ivana Milicevic). Logue, as the offbeat therapist, threatens to steal the movie a few times with his caustic psychiatry, and Waters as the older sister is priceless as a concerned mom who can deliver a line like "Who put SpongeBob in the pasta?" with an equal amount of anger, humor and pathos. But it's the Napoleon Dynamite kid, Heder, who's liable to win a lot of laughs and draw audiences who wouldn't normally go see this movie.
As far as the leads, Witherspoon has proven her worth in romantic comedy with Sweet Home Alabama, and Ruffalo isn't a typical leading man, but he made 13 Going on 30 tolerable. Ruffalo is a guy's guy, not a pretty boy, not an obvious sex symbol, and so his character is even more likable, especially for the guys who will be dragged to what they think will be a chick flick. Ultimately, they'll be pleasantly surprised.
Ruffalo's comic moment comes in a memorable bar scene when Elizabeth invades his body while he's trying to meet other women. Then the connection between the lead actors is palpable when they crawl into bed together and realize they can't even touch each other. It's truly touching—or not.
The music in the background is inspired. Listen for titles like "Just Your Imagination" and other tunes that will add humor to the already funny situations. There is a dream sequence, a dark secret and a few other fanciful moments that all tie up neatly in the end for a compact fun ride. (Don't let anyone tell you there's some Terri Schiavo allegory in it; those are people who are looking too deep.)
So far, this is the best romantic comedy of the year—that's not saying much, of course—and with the spiritual SF elements it's all the better.
