Nick-Davis.com: Ghost

Ghost
First screened in Fall 1990 / Most recently screened and reviewed in July 2025

Director: Jerry Zucker. Cast: Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, Tony Goldwyn, Rick Aviles, Vincent Schiavelli, Gail Boggs, Armelia McQueen, Phil Leeds, Angelina Estrada, Augie Blunt, Vivian Bonnell, Charlotte Zucker, Bruce Jarchow. Screenplay: Bruce Joel Rubin.

Twitter Capsule: Don't you see it's not a fake? Not about this! Emotions and archetypes played with startling sincerity. Hokum made sublime.

VOR: ④ Skeptics have points, but romantic dramas rarely exhibit such multigeneric ambition, and with such affective success. Bold in its earnestness.

To paraphrase Parker Posey, I feel so lucky to have born amongst Ghost, which I saw about five times in the theater, and probably ten times since. I'd have voted for Ghost in a heartbeat amid that Best Picture lineup, and if Jerry Zucker had been up for Best Director, I'd have voted for him, too. You try making a movie that not only needs to pull off all those disparate genres but where actors in the same scene have to occupy totally different tonal worlds and still be intimately connected. To take just one example, when Oda Mae first comes over to Molly's apartment, Whoopi is in a paranormal comedy, Demi is in a heartbroken tragedy, and Patrick is in a crime-inflected metaphysical beat-the-clock conundrum... and the scene works beautifully. It's funny, and it's sad, and it clarifies the stakes and thrust of a tricky narrative situation.

Ghost is handsomely photographed and thoughtfully composed at the visual level, by Zucker and by Terminator 2 cinematographer Adam Greenberg, when a lot of directors and producers would have let the movie ride on performance, personality, and plot convolution alone. The lensing and lighting have a point of view on New York: a border zone between burnished romanticism and brooding threat, without seeming too stylized in either direction, because Ghost's keyword is real. The editing is great, in the momentum throughout, in the timing of particular cuts, and in making a movie that so easily could have seemed like discontinuous segments feel rangy, sure, but entirely cohesive. Seems like that Walter Murch cat might really know some things! That composer Maurice Jarre might, also.

I love that everybody involved treated Ghost with such emotional earnestness, regarding with such reverence not just the afterlife and the fact of death but the possibilities of human intimacy—without tilting into nobility, and even while risking the kind of derision for such dewy-eyed, heavenly-beams-of-light sincerity that Ghost has always attracted from some people. It cannot have hurt that everyone involved had quite a bit to prove: all of the three leads were on tenuous ground with major but recently fragile careers, and nobody thought that director could pull off a project like this. You feel everyone's trust in each other, as well as everyone's joy in each other and belief in the story, and the relaxation from actors who can tell that a big studio team is actually making the film they saw in the script, not the cynical, superficial distortion that often winds up on screen, out of a belief that audiences want entertainment more than emotion, or that emotion isn't entertaining. Obviously, the professional precarity shared by so much of the key talent, plus the rightful sense that the screenplay could easily slide into hodgepodge or farce or fiasco, could have scared everyone into being tentative or stuck in their own heads or obedient to misguided instructions from the top. Instead, Zucker must have worked hard to get everyone on the same page, put everyone at ease about this movie and what it represented for each of them, and then led everyone behind and before the camera in taking the material seriously, but not self-seriously. And that's directing. Grade: A–

(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd.)

(in September 2007: B+)

Academy Award Nominations and Winners:
	Best Picture
★	Best Supporting Actress: Whoopi Goldberg
★	Best Original Screenplay: Bruce Joel Rubin
	Best Film Editing: Walter Murch
	Best Original Score: Maurice Jarre

Golden Globe Nominations and Winners:
	Best Picture (Musical/Comedy)
	Best Actress (Musical/Comedy): Demi Moore
	Best Actor (Musical/Comedy): Patrick Swayze
★	Best Supporting Actress: Whoopi Goldberg

Other Awards:
	British Academy Awards (BAFTAs): Best Supporting Actress (Goldberg)

Permalink

Home

1990

ABC

E-Mail