Greg Kinnear (left) and Ricky Gervais laugh it up in Ghost Town

Of Comics and Cops

Gervais makes amends, Jackson makes trouble

M ost famous as a cult TV actor-writer (The Office, Extras), England’s Ricky Gervais brings his “comedy of discomfort” to the silver screen via Ghost Town, an eccentric and good-natured comedy about an astonishingly unlikable man. Gervais plays Bertram Pincus, a lonely and self-absorbed dentist who so loathes human contact that he can’t wait to cram his patients’ mouths full of cotton pads to shut them up, and hits the “door close” button in the elevator rather than share a ride even when someone burdened with packages calls out asking him to keep the door open. Things get interesting after Bertram dies for seven minutes while under general anesthetic: when he is revived he finds himself able to see ghosts—unhappy spirits that pester him to clear up their unfinished business on Earth that is keeping them tied to our temporal plane.

Bertram hates these nagging ghosts even more than living humans so he is forced to strike a bargain with Frank (Greg Kinnear), who in life had been cheating on his wife, Gwen (Téa Leoni), and now wants to save her from marriage to a man he believes is only interested in her money. The deal is simple: if Bertram befriends Gwen and stops the marriage, then Frank will get the other ghosts to leave him in peace. The only problem is that the socially awkward Bertram is such a passive-aggressive creep that his initial efforts to cozy up to Gwen are hilariously unsuccessful. Oddly, though, Gwen comes to see a human side to Bertram, mostly appreciating his sly sense of humour. And by the time Bertram starts to fall in love with her, you find yourself watching this season’s quirkiest romantic comedy.

There have been so many “ghost” movies over the years that have sentimentalized death that it is remarkable how fresh Town is. Even as we watch this latter-day Scrooge being redeemed, any taste of saccharine is obliterated by Gervais, who has no qualms about acting the human gargoyle in order to make us laugh (and cringe). The other strength of the film is Leoni, whose character has real chemistry with Bertram because she is almost as weird as he is. Although not quite a knee-slapper, Town will have you chuckling and giggling all the way through.

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As Barack Obama’s run for the White House has made abundantly clear, race is still a hot-button issue in the United States—so much so that the racially themed psychological thriller Lakeview Terrace uses an out-of-control California wildfire raging in the background as the film’s defining metaphor. And what makes the story even more uncomfortable is how the action is triggered by reverse racism, in the person of an angry and self-righteous black policeman named Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson) whose initial dislike for the interracial couple that just moved in next door eventually grows malevolent.

Chris Mattson (Patrick Wilson, Little Children) and his new wife Lisa (Kerry Washington, Last King of Scotland) are a happy couple, even if Chris doesn’t enjoy being patronized by his powerful father-in-law and has to sneak cigarettes in his car because Lisa hates him smoking. Chris sees himself as an enlightened white man who has moved beyond any prejudice, and is jarred when he realizes that Abel not only despises them but also makes it clear he wants them out of the neighbourhood. From veiled threats to slashed tires on his Prius, Chris has no idea how to handle a swaggering—and armed—cop with a 28-year tenure on the LAPD. And then the hostilities become overt.

Terrace was directed by playwright-turned-filmmaker Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men), a reliable provocateur who usually writes his own scripts but here is just a hired gun. (He also directed the 2006 remake of the ’70s horror classic The Wicker Man, and both jobs presumably represent pay cheques that will allow him to work on more personal projects.) For the first hour or so the film is classy and restrained as we watch the escalating battle of wills between the two men. This struggle—as well as emerging tensions between Chris and his wife—show us that Chris is possibly tainted by the racism he thought didn’t affect him. But this kind of thoughtfulness that one would expect from LaBute is suddenly jettisoned to make way for a violent conclusion: what had been a suspenseful and well-acted drama deteriorates into a melodramatic and clumsily plotted shoot-’em-up. That said, Terrace is still worth watching—especially for the quietly menacing Jackson, who grins at Wilson like a shark that has just spotted its lunch.

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(Ghost Town and Lakeview Terrace both continue at the Odeon and SilverCity)