Movie: Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990)
Every once in a while a guy mostly known for making silly comedies with his brother will suddenly find himself directing a Best Picture contender. Green Book is one of those films that's become a victim of Oscar success. It's nowhere near one of the best films of any year, but I found its central relationship appealing and liked that it always looked at the world through Tony Lip's eyes, rarely letting modern, more enlightened sensibilities seep through. An unsophisticated oaf discovering the absurdities of racial segregation is not able to intellectualise them away, emphasising how plainly obvious it is that black Americans being discriminated is both a fact and an abomination. Even if it doesn't always work, the film highlights why excuses about the past being a different time don't really cut it. I have however always been annoyed by the Farrelly's tendencies to sentimentalise their crude and vulgar characters, providing them with unearned and unnecessary pathos. That touch of dishonesty that's always there in their comedies is unsurprisingly more pronounced in a serious-minded film and it's easy to see why many didn't buy Tony's anti-racist turn as 'inspirational'.
When looking for a funny comedy, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker will always be a better bet than the Farrelly Brothers. To my surprise and delight, Ghost shares the "anything goes" spirit of The Naked Gun and Airplane!. It presents the dead as ghosts roaming around in the physical world, unseen by the living, but doesn't bother with any form of tedious world building. Any seemingly established rules are immediately thrown out of the window if there is potential for a cool, fun, tense, or romantic moment. Late in the movie one of the villains dies and is immediately taken away by shadowy figures making horrifying sounds. It's a surprising, creepy scene that works because the film trusts the audience enough to introduce unexpected elements without feeling the need to set them up in advance or justify any in-universe logic. In addition it also constantly changes its POV, allowing itself even more freedom to switch genres on the fly. It can be a slapstick comedy (Whoopi Goldberg playing a grifting medium who becomes terrified when she realises she can actually communicate with the dead is an inspired choice) in one scene, and an action-thriller in the next, and then swerve into fantasy, horror and romance without ever feeling tonally off. Zucker does make the boring choice once, during the film's emotional climax when Sam (Patrick Swayze) and Molly (Demi Moore) have one last opportunity to experience each other in the flesh. We see the entire scene from Sam's point of view, when Molly's would have been funnier and more mischievous.
Ghost is at its most romantic in the famous pottery scene, set to Unchained Melody, and performed by Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze with unabashed sensuality, emphasising how much they enjoy turning each other on. The two shots of a jukebox switching records (an almost literal mic-drop) bookending the scene suggest that Zucker and co. are very much aware of what they have created and basically give the audience permission to feel a certain way about it too. I loved the choice to show the jukebox in extreme close up, without any sense of the space surrounding it. It's a seemingly inconsequential shot that opens up many possibilities. It could theoretically be in the loving couple's home, adding a bit of colorful detail to what kind of people they are, but it's equally likely that Zucker is coyly breaking the fourth wall, showing the viewers something that doesn't belong to the film's world. A third option is of course that the jukebox does belong to the film's world, without Moore and Swayze knowing about it. Later on, when Swayze becomes a ghost after getting shout, he will find that supernatural entities are constantly intruding in our lives, through barely perceptible actions that may well have major consequences.
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