Frank needs to help her move on, you see, before he can do his own moving on in the direction of that bright white light that's also the goal for Jennifer Love Hewitt's weekly quota of specters.īertram is a little slow on the uptake about how this system works, but he eventually discovers - as he must in such formulaic material - that while he's been trying to save Gwen from a marriage to a self-important human rights lawyer (Billy Campbell), he has also fallen in love with her.Īgain, how could he not? Not only is Leoni's Gwen charming and funny (and completely adorable when she's trying not to laugh at Bertram's acerbic japes), she's also an Egyptologist. He finds it in a wheeler-dealer ghost named Frank (Greg Kinnear), whose wife discovered he was cheating on her just at the moment he was flattened by a city bus. Now, he's pestered day in, day out by a veritable herd of ghosts, all with unfinished business that only a living person can help them with.īefore you can say Ghost Whisperer, Bertram is looking for a way out of this conundrum. This is immediately irritating for Betram, who likes his job precisely because it allows him to work on patients who are mostly silenced by the giant wads of cotton in their mouths. He's a preternaturally grumpy, self-isolating dentist who wakes up, following seven minutes of clinical death owing to 'poorly administered anesthesia' during minor surgery, with the sudden ability to talk to dead people. She gets squeezed out of sight by the tightening frame, but in that moment, exasperated and lovely, Leoni inspires a flash of hope that this movie won't be as predicable as it looks.Īlas, Ghost Town does turn out to be awfully predictable, despite Leoni's light touch, starting with the unwieldy premise designed to jump-start the romance between Bertram and Leoni's Gwen. Granted, she's only rushing toward an elevator in a Manhattan apartment building, pleading with her neighbor to hold the elevator and galumphing along with a box as tall as she is - while Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais) pushes at the close-doors button in order to avoid the human contact he so despises. What's not to love about Tea Leoni? From her first moment onscreen in the otherwise by-the-numbers romantic comedy Ghost Town, she's enchanting.

Gold Foil: As the mummy-obsessed Egyptologist who's the eventual object of Bertram's affection, Tea Leoni proves a 24 karat tonic in an otherwise predictable romantic comedy.

Ghost town movie