Welcome to another entry in the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!
Alright time to polish off the final 1990 Best Picture nominee, one that I couldn't believe was up for the big award at the time, and after actually viewing it I'm still baffled. That's right, it's the supernatural romantic dramedy, Ghost, starring Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg, and directed by Airplane's Jerry Zucker.
Note: SPOILERS ahead, this movie is after all 35 years old.
Ghost is about a young Manhattan couple for whom everything seems to be going great. Sam is a successful investment banker up for a promotion, while Molly is an up-and-coming artist. They've just purchased a (really luxurious) loft their friend Carl (Sam's coworker) helped them renovate into part-living space, part-art studio. At the banking firm Sam has stumbled across some troubling balance inconsistencies with a few of their accounts (Hmm, you gotta wonder how this is going to pay off later). One night while walking home from a play, Sam and Molly are attacked by a mugger and Sam is shot dead, but his ethereal consciousness remains on Earth, where he must figure out a way to communicate with Molly and piece together what happened and why. To that end he recruits a psychic named Oda Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg), a fraud with a long criminal record, in whom Sam has inadvertently awakened actual medium abilities. From there the film's tone shifts from romantic tragedy to screwball comedy, as Oda reluctantly agrees to help Sam mostly because he won't leave her alone. And then once Sam learns why he was killed (It was no random mugging I assure you) and who set him up (No points for spotting this bombshell a mile away), the tone shifts again to intense thriller fare.
Alright, so I think there is probably a good movie in here somewhere, but Jerry Zucker and his collaborators didn't quite find it. We don't spend a ton of time with Sam and Molly as a couple and so their chemistry doesn't really come across, in spite of the celebrated pottery wheel makeout session that was all over the advertising. Also, "I love you," "Ditto??" Stop it. Thus when Sam is killed the scene doesn't hit as hard as it should. The stuff with Sam and Oda Mae is entertaining, and Whoopi's is the best performance in the film (Though it's insane to me that she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar over Goodfellas' Lorraine Bracco, who was a revelation). Their comedic chemistry carries the middle sections, even if the radical tonal shifts throughout are just kind of odd. As I said, the big reveal that Sam was set up, and that it was by the person he least expected, are incredibly telegraphed once you ponder how much detail they go into about Sam's job before killing him off. Had the murder not occurred so early in the film this would've been less obvious.
Maybe the most unforgiveable moment though is at the film's climax, when our villain chases Molly and Oda around the apartment building, but Sam (who has learned how to interact with objects in the real world) intervenes. The villain throws a suspended hook at Sam (not sure why he thought that would work), it partially shatters a window, and the villain is inadvertently impaled to death, not by the hook but by the broken window. IMPALED. BY. THE BROKEN. WINDOW. Yeah, the remaining window glass has a jagged, pointy edge, and the window falls on the villain and the glass goes through his stomach. I guffawed out loud at the absurdity of this. Legit, it's the funniest moment in the entire film. Gotta be the worst death scene in cinema history, rivaled only by Julianne Moore's demise by greenhouse glass (glass, not gas) in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Ya know, when Rebecca DeMornay rigs the ceiling panels to slam shut with so much velocity that the glass falls out and is apparently so heavy it kills a person standing ten feet below? What was it with early 90s thrillers and broken glass-related mishaps?
Ghost also has some pretty shabby special effects, even for 1990. The composite shots of Sam trying to interact with objects have some very messy matte lines, and the moments where bad guys die and get taken away by animated shadowy demons look amateurish when they should be at least a little scary. I think a less literal approach would've been the way to go with some of this stuff.
Ghost is mildly entertaining cheeseball popcorn fluff and were it simply a hit movie I'd have gone a little easier on it. But this thing got a Best Picture nod which is just stunning, and maybe even worse, its screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin actually WON for Best Adapted Screenplay. I haven't seen any of the films he was up against but I'd be shocked if at least one of those scripts weren't superior to this one. I say again, "I love you." "Ditto." This feels like a present day nomination where the Academy was trying to boost ratings by including a dopey popcorn film in the mix (see Top Gun: Maverick, 2022).
Dances With Wolves, Goodfellas, Awakenings, The Godfather III......and Ghost. One of these things doesn't belong.
I give Ghost ** out of ****.
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