God Speed Your Love

Rating: 6/10 (23 November 2006)

"Ghost" is a film that breaks the normal rules. It is a film about the supernatural that is not a horror film. It is a comedy which takes as its theme violent death, but which is optimistic in tone rather than black or cynical. It is a romantic comedy in which the leading man dies during the first half-hour. And it is a film that breaks the rules and yet remains within the commercial Hollywood mainstream rather than branching out into art-house experimentalism.
When Sam Wheat, a New York banker, is murdered in the course of what appears to be a robbery, his spirit remains on earth in the form of a ghost. The ghostly Sam quickly realises that his death was no random mugging gone wrong and that he was murdered because he had stumbled onto the fact that his bank was being used by criminals to launder money. Sam also realises that his girlfriend Molly is also in danger from the criminals who killed him, and tries to warn her.
The film takes a fairly traditional view of the afterlife. (Much more traditional than, say, "Beetlejuice", another film from around the same period). On death, the souls of the good are rewarded with heavenly bliss, while the souls of the wicked are dragged down to hell by demons. A few souls, however, those who have unfinished business in this life, remain on earth as ghosts. They can see the living, but cannot normally be seen by them or communicate with them. Sam cannot therefore appear directly to Molly or speak to her, and in desperation he tries to make contact with Oda Mae Brown, a medium. Oda Mae, in fact, is a charlatan who makes her living by deceiving her clients into believing that she has psychic powers, but for some reason she is able to hear Sam (although not to see him). She is persuaded to help Sam warn Molly of the danger she is in, and also to help him frustrate the schemes of Carl, his corrupt former colleague who is responsible for both the money-laundering scam and Sam's murder.
The film contains a mixture of comedy and sentimentality. The comedy mostly comes in the scenes involving Oda Mae, well played by Whoopi Goldberg as that stock comic figure, the rogue with a (well-hidden) heart of gold who can (very reluctantly) be persuaded to do the decent thing. Goldberg has appeared in some very weak comedies, such as "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "A Knight in Camelot", but "Ghost" is one of her more successful roles. There are some very amusing scenes, such as the one where Oda Mae, using fake ID, manages to withdraw the $4,000,000 which the criminals have deposited in a false bank account and is then cajoled by Sam into giving the whole amount to a charity run by nuns rather than keeping it for herself.
The sentimentality comes in the scenes between Sam and Molly, both before his murder and at the end when she realises that his love for her has survived his death. The film's most famous scene- indeed, one of the most iconic scenes in modern cinema- is the one where Sam embraces Molly while she is making a pot (she is a potter by profession), to the strains of "Unchained Melody", and they end up making love. I will never think of pottery in the same way again. Or "Unchained Melody", come to that, although the words of that song do seem very appropriate to the film's theme of longing for an absent loved one.
I must admit that I had difficulty envisaging Patrick Swayze as one of the yuppie classes, but that is probably because I always think of him in terms of his working-class-hero character from "Dirty Dancing". Demi Moore, however, made a delightful heroine, showing just why she was regarded as one of the hottest young actresses of the late eighties and early nineties. No actress since Audrey Hepburn had worn that short, boyish haircut with such style and elegance. The film as a whole can sometimes seem corny, but overall it is a watchable mixture of comedy and tenderness. 6/10