Possibly the Best Supernatural Love Story Ever Filmed

Rating: 8/10 (5 May 2013)

What makes this film work is as much about the premise as it is about the acting and the music. The leads, Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, and Whoopi Goldberg turn what could have been a B-grade forgotten film into a very touching experience. "Ghost" is one of a few handful of films which is actually a hybrid of other genres, in this case the love story and the supernatural ghost story, successfully combined. Few hybrid-genre films have been as successful while most fall flat probably because of the difficulty of one genre overshadowing the other. One successful example which comes to mind is the original Ghost Busters, which combined comedy a la Saturday Night Live and supernatural horror.
Patrick Swayze, in possibly his best performance, plays Sam Wheat, a bank executive who has as his lover Molly Jensen, a kind and completely loyal woman who creates pottery. One of the most famous scenes prior to Wheat leaving the world of the living is when they both forge pottery together. Unbeknownst to either of them, some bank executives at Wheat's firm are embezzling funds, which they hide into an account held by a fictitious person. Wheat finds out about the discrepancies but becomes the target of a hit, successfully carried out, which kills Sam Wheat the living person and turns him into a ghost. Before leaving for the afterlife, Wheat decides to investigate further into the circumstances which killed him, and solicits the help of a crack-pot con artist-turned psychic, Oda Mae Brown, in an academy-award winning performance by Whoopi Goldberg. A strange threesome develops the Ghost, Brown and Jensen to investigate the scandalous behavior of Carl Bruner (Tony Goldwyn), former colleague and supposed-friend to the late Sam Wheat.
In one of the most moving of scenes, the Ghost of Sam Wheat lets his presence known to the lover he left in the world of the living, Molly, played with absolute believability by Demi Moore in possibly her best performance. Demi Moore's emotions and tears are what make this film work. When she realizes the ghost of Sam is in her presence, we as the audience are taken by her emotions. We suspend our disbelief and are captured by Moore's performance. She believes she has been touched by the ghost which makes us believe that we are also in the midst of a supernatural presence. Strangely, I have seen few scenes in films as moving as this one. Only certain scenes from Casablanca rival it.
Now certainly, I wouldn't rank this as one of the greatest films ever made, but it is a surprisingly strong offering, and one of the most moving supernatural stories I have ever seen. Horror movies are not typically designed to elicit tears in the audience, but this one does. The three leads are perfectly cast and make us care about the experience. One of the reasons I think Ghost succeeds is that it hits on the true emotions we feel in regards to the loss of a loved one. While ghost stories are usually designed to invoke feelings of dread and fear, we sometimes forget that the emotions are about love and loss in the real world when someone close to us "passes on". "Ghost" reminds us that we often want to hear from loved ones who are no longer a part of the world of the living.