Just like Heaven

It seems an extraordinary piece of selling-ice-to-Eskimos good fortune that French novelist Marc Levy secured $2 million from DreamWorks for the rights to his bestselling debut If Only It Were True. The book’s preoccupation with the complications of a romance bridging this world and the next is a longstanding Hollywood staple. In the resulting adaptation, Mark Ruffalo plays the grieving landscape architect David who falls for the less than corporeal charms of Reese Witherspoon’s Elizabeth, the workaholic doctor haunting his new apartment. If Just like Heaven fails to make an enduring impression, this is due to overfamiliarity rather than want of charm.

Directed by Mark Waters (maintaining a solid mainstream track record after 2004’s Mean Girls), Just like Heaven is distinguished by its restraint. Waters creates a credibly spellbound San Francisco, one that is full of sun-streamed windows, misted gardens and clouds pulsing with numinous presence. Magical interventions drive forward the narrative, as when a note advertising Elizabeth’s tragically vacated apartment flies off a message board and pirouettes in the air above David before fluttering down in front of his eyes.

Without recourse to the excessive sentimentality and visual trickery normally de rigueur for the supernatural rom-com, Just like Heaven achieves a modest cinematic alchemy. Special effects are restricted to some mischievous metaphysicality. Backing away from David’s insistence that she is a ghost, Elizabeth is confronted with her ethereality when she finds herself standing in the middle of a table, its wooden surface bisecting her midriff; it is the same effect as used in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

Elizabeth is more blonde control freak than blithe spirit; she harangues David for his slovenly housekeeping, bemoaning the mug rings he leaves on her furniture. But Witherspoon’s is a curiously sober performance, sidelining the demented relish that she brought to Election and Legally Blonde, and claiming few of the opportunities for spectral scene-stealing. This inhibition makes Elizabeth one of cinema’s less spirited apparitions, though her baffled estrangement from the physical world is all the more touching. Having taken pains initially to paint her as a driven professional with little time for dating or social niceties, thankfully the script does not labour her Scroogian spiritual renewal.

Satisfyingly, the dead-to-alive trajectory is as forcefully charted through Ruffalo’s David, who emerges from a chrysalis of mourning to find love again. The momentum of the dual regeneration culminates in a genuinely moving climax, which is only slightly dissipated by the sense of formulaic predetermination. Better jokes would have distracted from this predictability; but, save for a rather incongruous turn from Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder as a mellowed psychic running an occult bookstore, the comedy is left bizarrely untended.

This review features in the December 2005 issue of Sight & Sound.