Giving Up the Ghosts

By RICHARD CORLISS

The Muhammadans have seven heavens, but Hollywood does nicely with just one. It's decorated in basic white and packed in dry ice. Horses and dogs have wings there, and the flowers speak to God, who is either black or George Burns. When you arrive (by elevator or escalator), a choir as big as a Nuremberg rally greets you. But if you are the prematurely dispatched hero of a film fantasy, you won't stay long. Some dignified gent -- Claude Rains or James Mason -- will serve as celestial flight attendant for a poignant return trip to earth, where you will perform the one deed that makes your life fulfilled and your death noble. A dead man always gets his last request in Hollywood heaven.

So many grand and silly traditions have died in Hollywood, but this naive take on death is alive and well. From The Green Pastures, Here Comes Mr. Jordan and Stairway to Heaven in the '30s and '40s to Field of Dreams, All Dogs Go to Heaven and Always last year, movies have pictured the afterlife not as a dead end but as a Last Chance Salon. It is an angelic resort spa where the dearly departed is only nearly departed, where a hero is given the opportunity to tidy up unfinished business back home: perhaps to release a lover from the bondage of bereavement by whispering "I love you."

Two new movies set more daunting agendas for their protagonists in limbo. In Bill Cosby's inane comedy Ghost Dad, the late Cos must close a business deal and get a physical so his family will have life insurance. Then he must convince his daughter, who has also entered the twilight zone, that "life is all there is." In response she utters the year's top supersloppy double dare: "I'll get back into my body if you'll get back in yours." Darned if he doesn't. Dad, you see, is not dead yet. But his movie is.

So is Ghost -- a bad movie that a lot of people will like. It's got suspense, comedy, a big chase and a little sex. It has Demi Moore, pert and intense, every emotion acutely aquiver in fine Debra Winger fashion. But though director Jerry Zucker wants his necrophiliac romance to be sensitive, he pumps up its feelings fortissimo so the dimmest viewer will get the point. And in its vision of death on earth, Ghost is exasperatingly capricious.

Molly (Moore) and Sam (Patrick Swayze) are your typical Manhattan duo. They are smart, caring and gorgeous; they live in a fabulous loft. When they make love, to Bobby Hatfield's orgasmic rendition of Unchained Melody, the sex is so beautiful you could die from it. Too soon, Sam does die -- he is murdered -- in a plot twist that anyone can unravel in an eyewink. Now stranded between heaven and earth, he must use the gifts of a sassy psychic (Whoopi Goldberg) to alert Molly of threats to her life -- and, while he has her attention, to make mad pash one last time.

But how can a movie create a persuasive universe if it doesn't abide by its own rules? Both of these Ghost stories take grave liberties with the laws of physics. In the Cosby film, no one can see Dad at first; then only his children; then everybody, if the lights are low and the plot requires it. He walks on floors but falls calf-deep into a carpet. In Ghost Sam can walk through some walls but not others. At the climax, he wastes time trying to persuade Molly to open her door when he has the power to unlatch it. He is a most unreliable specter. If you were Molly, would you trust this ghost enough to have sex with him?

This skeptic makes the gloomy bet that viewers will defy logic and trust Ghost. Just as Field of Dreams evoked tears over a game of catch with a dead father, Ghost will touch moviegoers with its heavenly message that love can raise the dead.