Just Like Heaven: Movie & DVD Review (2005)

Just like something that could only come out of Hollywood.

Here, as the indefatigable Elizabeth, a single San Francisco ER doctor whose car slams into a truck, Reese Witherspoon is a lively, bickering spirit who has the ability to look cute while walking through walls and sitting in refrigerators, where her head, shoulders and torso are neatly severed by shelves.

As David, Mark Ruffalo makes for an attractive drunk with no spirit who has given up on life after the death of his wife. Together, he and Elizabeth collide and find that they have issues, a good deal of which involve living space.

He has subletted her apartment, which she demands back. Trouble is, all signs point to Elizabeth being dead, which gets to the film's other issue. She either really is a goner and thus David is dealing with a ghost haunting his apartment--cue the exorcism, cue the occult dude (Jon Heder) with the offbeat insights into the afterlife--or her presence is the direct result of his grief compounded by too much drink.

Either way you cut it, it can only cut one way--"Just Like Heaven" is a big-budget romantic comedy, which means that it won't exactly take audiences with supernatural powers to figure out how it will turn out.

Since you know going into it that there is nothing here that will derail these two from a celestial path of love and the tugs of the heart that tend to accompany it ("Ghost" anyone?), it's up to director Mark Waters ("Freaky Friday," "Mean Girls") and his charismatic leads to make this wispy journey to heaven feel like just that.

On some levels, they do. As written by Peter Tolan and Leslie Dixon from Marc Levy's novel, "If Only it Were True," "Just Like Love" is especially good in its early goings, with Witherspoon recalling the self-centered pluck of her younger days, and Ruffalo game as her watery co-star.

Their interactions are nicely served by Bruce Green's editing, who understands the comedic effect of the quick cut. Also good is Donal Logue as David's friend, Jack, whose reply to David when he learns that David is seeing someone "who isn't there," is the film's dialogue at its best: "You mean she's emotionally unavailable?"

You could say that. You could also say that by the time this trip to heaven detours into its hive of complications, it derails itself with revelations that come uncomfortably close to a recent media sensation. Just what that is won't be revealed here, but when it hits, it brings this little slice of heaven crashing back to Earth.

Grade: C+