A movie that I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to when it first came out was Ghost Town. Now, me not paying attention to a movie is fairly unremarkable: I watch considerably more television which leads to me lagging behind the movie world with respect to most movies, especially when it comes to hidden gems.

That said, I usually hear about the movies I need to see through the internet or my real world friends, but sometimes those networks fail me and in this case it led me to watching Ghost Town without any preconceptions or prejudgement.

I’ve seen Ghost Town twice now and the acerbic wit of Ricky Gervais’ character, Bertram Pincus, remains as entertaining and the romantic arc of the story — pairing Tea Leoni with Gervais in an odd yet effective combination — still feel far more natural than most romantic comedies. Having only seen it twice, I hesitate to place it into my much-vaunted collection of so-called “perfect films,” a collection containing Groundhog Day among others¹, but I think it’s nonetheless one of the finest films I’ve seen in recent memory².

Truthfully, Gervais is barely playing a character here. He is playing Ricky Gervais, for the most part, but that works to the movie’s benefit. The character Bertram Pincus is supposed to be unlikeable but not really; any other actor wouldn’t have been able to walk that delicate line between protagonist and prick.

Of course any romantic comedy wouldn’t work if the relationship didn’t mesh, but in this movie it works perfectly. Both Gervais’ and Leoni’s characters have the appearance of incompatibility but grow together in a very natural method. Despite the initial conceit of the dead husband (Greg Kinnear) playing Cyrano to Pincus’ Christian, almost all of the scenes that play out between the two leads are unencumbered by Kinnear’s shtick, leaving the relationship to come together naturally.

I often deride romantic comedies for leaving out the mundane moments that solidify relationships, the beautiful banality of love, and this movie gets it perfect. From Leoni’s character spotting the price tag on the back of Gervais’ newly bought shirt as they share some hard candies, to the jokes they crack with each other as they confide sadnesses from their past, this movie gets the little things just right. There’s a particularly poignant line from Leoni, responding to Gervais’ confession of what he considers his ‘boring and ordinary’ breakup, that gets my point across:

It’s not boring and ordinary, by the way. We just get the one life, you know. Just one. We can’t life someone else’s or think it’s more important just because it’s more dramatic. What happens matter. Maybe only to us, but it matters.

Unlike other romantic comedies that emphasize the grandiose nature of their story, this one revels in the ordinary. Yes, the trappings of the romantic comedy are all there: the initial deceit, the subsequent relationship, the truth revealed, and the final redemption. It’s all there in fairly formulaic structure, but romantic comedies have this structure for a reason, and in this case it’s, in my opinion, a necessary structure to connect the audience to the story which is playing out in such a subversively naturalistic manner.

What it comes down to though — ignoring all the little nuances, ignoring the growth Pincus undergoes, ignoring the side stories that emphasize the main premise³, ignoring even the path the two leads take to their ultimate relationship — I think the movie is made brilliant by the closing lines “It hurts when I smile,” followed by “I can fix that for you.” So subdued, yet perfectly aligned with the characters and the bond they’ve formed. If more romantic comedies were like this, the world would be a better place.

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Footnotes

1. Though they’re certainly not all romantic comedies despite the example given [↩]
2. I’m not claiming that it’s better than all the other movies I’ve seen recently, but for a romantic comedy it is moving without being (too) heavyhanded, romantic without being saccharine, and has sincerity without cloying sentimentality. In other words, it does its job remarkably well. [↩]
3. The ghost stories are mostly filler, but I still found them moving and they certainly emphasized the idea that the simplest acts can mean so much. [↩]