Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Mark Ruffalo, Donal Logue

7 out of 10 stars

Part ghost story, part love story and absolutely frickin' adorable, Just Like Heaven is probably about the smartest dumb comedy you'll ever find. If you've ever imagined what a promising yet goofy teen romantic comedy would be like with good actors, a solid polish on the screenplay, and a firm directorial hand, this is the perfect example; it's a movie that's all grown up yet still grounded in a certain adolescent, wacky mindset. And that turns out not necessarily to be a bad thing, for despite you wanting it to take place in some kind of reality that is actually of this earth, Just Like Heaven floats along on clouds of extreme good will and lighthearted charm, which is pretty amazing considering most of its plot is centered around death, or its imminent approach.

The lion's share of Just Like Heaven's success rests firmly on the shoulders of director Mark Waters, who manages to balance the gooey aspects of his story with the comedic ones, and never lets the film tip too much into one territory or the other. Every time the film veers towards something schmaltzy, Waters manages some kind of amazing left turn in tone that never allows it to dip more than a toe into something sappy and sticky and way too sweet. The result is a romantic comedy with lovers more irritable than usual, a supporting cast that doesn't feel as if it's been culled from the Wacky Second Fiddle file (aside from one character, that is), and a surprisingly heartfelt love story that will probably put a lump in your throat no matter how hard you resist. There are romantic comedies that make you laugh and get all giddy when their lovers unite, and ones that make you cry with happiness when they do, but few films manage to do both at the same time. Which isn't to say that Just Like Heaven is a classic - it misses that mark by almost a mile, and no matter how many good things you have to say about it, this is a movie that has more in common with Freaky Friday than Roman Holiday.

The tone of Just Like Heaven is set pretty much from the get-go, as it opens on lovely Elizabeth Masterson (Reese Witherspoon) sitting in a lush, beautiful garden laced with fog and ringed with tons of flowers - it's the kind of setting most of us would consider our "happy place." And indeed, that's just where Elizabeth's gone, and just as you're about to throw in the towel at all the floral schmaltz, she's suddenly jolted awake by the realities of her job as a doctor and the unglamorous harsh glare of her hospital's break room. A woman who doesn't blink at being on duty 26 hours straight and has developed a meaningful relationship with the cafeteria's coffee machine, she's all work and no play, revered by co-workers who also pity the fact that she has no outside life. When she finally gets a chance to escape from the hospital to her sister's home, she's suddenly met on the rainy streets of San Francisco by the glare of truck headlights heading straight towards her.

Flash forward to sad-sack yet extremely adorable David Abbott (Mark Ruffalo), a man looking for an apartment in San Francisco, apparently in which he plans to drink himself into a stupor while watching television and eating junk food. Finding a dream apartment that's about one step away from real estate pornography, he sets about on a stream of benders - that is, until one night a lovely yet brittle blond woman suddenly screams at him to put a coaster under his beer can. The woman is of course Elizabeth, but she can't even remember her name, much less the fact that she is not entirely corporeal - she does, however, remember that it's her apartment David's squatted in, and wants him out. Convinced he's saddled with a ghost, David tries all means of exorcising her, but the two ultimately embark on a flinty, tenuous journey to find out who Elizabeth is, and why she's chained to this earth. The search, of course, also reveals why David is such a sullen, morose hermit, and the secret that he's locked away in his heart. Cue the violins.

It's an awfully predictable and saccharine premise, yet screenwriters Peter Tolan (Analyze This) and Leslie Dixon (Freaky Friday) manage to make the scenes between Elizabeth and David crackle with a level of comedic hostility that thoroughly overlies the attraction beneath. Instead of playing it all cutesy-wutesy, Witherspoon and Ruffalo go at each other with a ferocity rarely seen in romantic comedy stars, who tend to tiptoe around each other's one-liners for fear of mussing up someone's hair. The lack of physical contact actually works in driving up their chemistry, not because they long to embrace but because you can tell they obviously want to slap one another for being so obnoxious and/or stubborn. Their growing friendship and romance also seems fairly natural, as they're drawn to each other's smarts as well as good looks; the characters as well as the actors respect each other, which is more than you can expect in most synthetic love stories.

For the first time in a long while, Witherspoon actually seems like a good actress instead of one pretending to be a movie star, and once you get past the fact that this perky, not-yet-thirty sprite is a crack doctor, her performance is amazingly nuanced. At first Elizabeth is a fully-made character, and when she's divested of her identity and memory, Witherspoon finds an extremely adroit way of playing the essences of a character who has ferocious drive but nothing to ground her energy in. And the dreamy Ruffalo is a perfect against-type choice as the romantic hero - to stretch the Freaky Friday comparisons further, he's the Jamie Lee Curtis of the movie, an actor put into extremely zany situations who manages to find both the heart and humor underneath. As an extra added bonus, David seems a little bit like a psycho, so he's cute, surly, and slightly deranged all at the same time, which of course makes him all the more desirable. And as the movie veers from the spectral to the decidedly medical, his and Witherspoon's dynamic keeps the movie from venturing into overtly manipulative territory.

The one glaring misstep in Just Like Heaven is the quasi-stunt casting of Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder as an occultist dude who aids David and Elizabeth in their quest to find out the true nature of her existence. Heder's line readings, which are all about inflection and nothing about acting, are a striking contrast to the rest of the excellent supporting cast, which includes Rosalind Chao and Ben Shenkman as Elizabeth's work colleagues, Donal Logue as David's shrink/best friend, and the amazing Dina Waters as Elizabeth's sister, who can go from teary to hilarious in a matter of mere seconds. You might wish all this talent had gone into the service of a movie that does not feature a zany montage of religious "experts" trying to rid an apartment of a ghost or a scene in which a man must flail about in a bar possessed by a hostile ghost, but if Just Like Heaven doesn't ascend to the heights it should, it comes pretty darn close. To co-opt a famous movie quote, don't let's ask for the moon when we have these two particular stars.