Four days ago, I wrote about how March of the Penguins, Just Like Heaven and The Exorcism of Emily Rose were being dragged into the culture wars. Now A.O. Scott of the New York Times beats the drum again, paying special attention to Just Like Heaven:
But a movie that looks at first like a soft, supernatural variation on the urban singleton themes of “Sex and the City,” by the end comes to seem like a belated brief in the Terri Schiavo case. (If you insist on being surprised by the plot of “Just Like Heaven,” it might be best to stop reading now). Elizabeth, as it happens, is not dead, but rather in a coma from which she is given little chance of awakening. To make matters worse – and to set up a madcap climax in which Donal Logue rescues the film’s faltering sense of humor – she has signed a living will, which her loving sister, urged on by an unprincipled doctor, is determined to enforce. But Elizabeth’s spirit, along with Mr. Ruffalo’s character, David, has second thoughts because she is so obviously alive, and the two must race to prevent the plug from being pulled, which means running through hospital corridors pushing a comatose patient on a gurney.
Would I have been happier if Elizabeth died? The very absurdity of the question – what kind of romantic comedy would that be? – is evidence of the film’s ingenuity. Who could possibly take the side of medical judgment when love, family, supernatural forces and the very laws of genre are on the other side? And who would bother to notice that the villainous, materialistic doctor, despite having the religiously neutral last name Rushton, is played by Ben Shenkman, a bit of casting that suggests a faint, deniable whiff of anti-Semitism? Similarly, it can’t mean much that Elizabeth, the ambitious career woman, is sad and unfulfilled in contrast to her married, stay-at-home-mom sister. Or that the last word you hear (uttered by Jon Heder, first seen in “Napoleon Dynamite”) is “righteous.”
The ingenuity of “Just Like Heaven” is that it does not insist on its righteousness. Its spiritual conceits are not associated with the doctrines of any particular religion, and its humor, while studiously clean, never feels prim or self-conscious. . . .
It almost sounds as though Scott is saying the filmmakers meant to send a pro-life or right-wing message, and they cleverly devised an “ingenious” way to make it subtle. But until and unless I hear otherwise, I think it would be much simpler, and safer, to assume that the filmmakers didn’t have any agenda at all, and simply wanted to exploit their basic guy-meets-ghost premise in a way that would create obstacles but also lead to a satisfying resolution.
If there is any pro-life resonance, my guess is they stumbled into it, rather than “ingeniously” contrived it. Perhaps the film does not “feel” self-conscious about its “righteousness” because it wasn’t consciously trying to be “righteous” in that sense in the first place.
And the quasi-accusation of anti-Semitism just sounds paranoid.
FWIW, see also GetReligion.org‘s comment on Scott’s piece.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In