Better Late Than Never (or thank goodness for DVDs)

With a trip to the movies costing $7.50 to $9.00 per adult, like many Americans I've grown more selective. Besides, to be honest, when I saw the previews last fall for Just Like Heaven, I dismissed it as something more likely to appeal to my teenager daughters than to a middle-age dad. As it turns out, I was half right. My daughters enjoyed the movie. I really enjoyed the movie.

Over the weekend, while all three of my daughters made a trip to Virginia Beach, my wife and I worked on various home and work-related projects. I can't honestly remember why but late Saturday when I learned that my oldest had actually purchased the 2005 film, I sat down with my bride and we cranked up the VCR.

Starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo,  Just Like Heaven is simple yet with enough plot twists to make it not easily summarized.

Witherspoon is 7 to 7 type of physician: seven one morning until seven the next morning.

She is in search of the Holy Grail--the much coveted "Attending Physician" position. Her character makes your workaday workaholic like me look like we're on unemployment.

On the way over to her sister's home for yet another blind date, a distracted Elizabeth Masterson (Witherspoon) runs smack into a truck. The next thing we know David Abbot (Ruffalo), a landscape architect  (and we subsequently learn, a grieving widower),  is subleasing her apartment.

When an apparently ghostly aberration –Masterson--indignantly informs David this is HER apartment, the audience (and David) thinks she is dead. We immediately think of a host of films with variations on this theme, going back to The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, All of Me, Return to Me, and, of course, Ghost.

Some of the hijinks are extremely amusing. Masterson is  incorporeal and no one but David can see or hear her. She  remembers no details and tries to figure out who/what she is. Abbot helps her, initially to get rid of Elizabeth, but later for more personal reasons. As they say in the newspapers, here comes the plot spoiler.

With the assistance of a New Age bookstore clerk named Darryl (Jon Heder), eventually, they/we learn she is not dead. Elizabeth's been in a coma for three months. (Naturally, like you would, I immediately thought of Terri Schiavo.)

More and more details of Masterton's life are revealed to her. Although a very good and caring physician, she had no life outside the hospital. (She is in her apartment so seldom, had the other tenants seen her, they might have thought they were seeing a ghost.) Elizabeth begins to wonder about the life she had chosen.

In a balanced and gentle way,  Just Like Heaven  brings into play many of the elements which so often drive a decision for death when a patient is in a coma. Contrary to some reviews, with one exception, the decision to disconnect Elizabeth is not motivated by characters with ignoble motives.

For example, there is Elizabeth's  sister, Abby, (Dina Waters) married with kids and a good egg, who has agreed to remove Elizabeth from the ventilator. Not because she is evil or wicked but because Elizabeth signed a living will.

David tells an overwhelmed Elizabeth, "It's way better than [being] dead." Her response? "The monitor doesn't agree."

In the first of the pivotal statements, David disagrees. "Machines don't know everything," he says.  "Everything in my training tells me they do," she responds.

"Then how are we having this conversation?," David asks shrewdly. Elizabeth can only answer, "I don't know."

In fairly short order, Elizabeth changes her mind, particularly when she learns that her sister has signed the papers to remove Elizabeth from the ventilator. The scene in which David translates all the please-don't-disconnect-me pleas  from the unseen-except-to-him Elizabeth is both extremely funny and enormously touching. Whereas she had signed a form agreeing to be removed if she were ever in a coma, now Elizabeth protests, "That was before. I'm completely for it now!"

As Steven D. Greydanus pointed out in his perceptive review, Just Like Heaven, raises a host of pressing questions:

"a person not yet incapacitated is in no position to sign away life-sustaining measures in case they should ever become incapacitated, since what they would actually want under the circumstances may well be completely different from how they feel now;

Many critics panned Just Like Heaven. This is not Citizen Kane or The Maltese Falcon, I grant you.

Moreover the film is a tad on the sentimental side. Indeed, it is so "blatantly sentimental," says critic Richard Roeper, who liked the film, "it makes Sleepless in Seattle look like [the movie] 9  ½ half weeks." Without giving away the particulars, the film ends well.

Just Like Heaven  raises terribly important issues in an unthreatening way that will make people who were soft on Terri think again, but it is a vast overstatement to say, as did A.O. Scott of the New York Times, that it's "like a belated brief in the Terri Schiavo case."

Let me close with the closing of a review by Kathleen Lopez.

Writing on nationalreview.com. she observes

"The stuff of Discovery Channel documentary? Obviously not. Realistic? Not totally. But so what? Just Like Heaven is, on the surface, a silly romantic comedy. How many of those are realistic and fact-based? Life would indeed be just like heaven if we all got the happy endings most romantic comedies tend to wrap up with. But to take a topic that is so difficult and make it funny and maybe inspire the audience to think about the preciousness of life in a fresh and loving and disarmingly light way, Just Like Heaven comes pretty close to being from somewhere just like its title suggests."

Please send your comments to Dave Andrusko at dandrusko@nrlc.org.