Review of Ghost Town (2008) by Chads. — 21 Sep 2008

Dead man calling on a dead Blackberry; no minutes for a smartphone in purgatory, but its purgatorial owner still insists on trying to get through. To who, though: Gwen(Tea Leoni), his wife, or the other woman? As seen in the trailers for "Ghost Town", Bertram Pincus(Ricky Gervais) feels nothing but disdain for humankind: colleagues, patients, and strangers alike, in equal measure.

And when he meets the ghosts, they're not spared the impetus of his utter contempt for their undead corporeality either. But Frank Herlihy(Greg Kinnear) matches the dentist's old-fashioned misanthropy with his own technologically-advanced misanthropy.

While Bertram stares at people with open contempt whenever somebody makes an overture towards friendship, a one-on-one connection, Frank uses a hand-held device to keep people at bay. The Verizon guy who says, "Can you hear me now?" in the popular ad campaign for the American broadband and telecommunications company, works as a subtext in "Ghost Town", which finds perfect form in the ghosts that haunt the unsmiling oral surgeon.

It's Bertram's comeuppance that he's forced to recognize the dead, in lieu of not acknowledging the living on a daily basis. And then there's Frank, a cell-phone user, who walks and talks in self-absorbed oblivion to the people who sidle up beside him during the course of a typical conversation, a typical day of communion with technology.

Barely cognizant of other people's existences, in essence, he and other serial cell-phone abusers render these background ciphers as ghosts. "Can you see me now?" Even with a defunct Blackberry, the tuxedo-cladded man seems more interested in his phone than his unearthly comrades.

Frank needs Bertram because he can't reach Gwen by phone. It's an irony he can't talk to his wife face-to-face either, and needs a new go-between(Bertram) to replace the old go-between(the Blackberry) as a facilitator of intimate communication.

"Ghost Town" is so much more than a romantic-comedy. In an early scene, Bertram exits a room without stopping to fawn over a colleague's baby photos. Now imagine this scene if the dentist had a Blackberry stuck to his ear.

"Ghost Town" is about cell-phones. It's about how the cell-phone usage breeds a more subtle brand of misanthropy.