MOVED BY THE SPIRIT 'JUST LIKE HEAVEN' TRIES TO AVOID ROMANTIC COMEDY PURGATORY.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Seen a good romantic comedy lately?

We haven't either. But the folks responsible for ``Just Like Heaven,'' in which a spirit played by Reese Witherspoon haunts, and then enchants, the depressed slob (Mark Ruffalo) who moves into her apartment, believe that they have the remedy for that.

``Well, it's actually funny and romantic, unlike many romantic comedies these days,'' cracks Ruffalo, who's been in his share of lame love comedies (``View From the Top'') and comedy-fantasies (``13 Going on 30'').

``Romantic comedy has really evolved since that time when there used to be a lot of social conventions and all sorts of reasons why people couldn't be together,'' observes Witherspoon, whose own successes in the field (``Sweet Home Alabama,'' the ``Legally Blonde'' films) tend to fortify the mushy stuff with fish-out-of-water and culture-clash gags.

``Now there's nothin' but a few cosmos between two people getting together. So it's hard to create a comedy that creates that tension, where they really want to be together but can't. I thought this was a very interesting and fresh idea, and a very modern take on romantic comedy.''

Despite their initial hostility, workaholic doctor Elizabeth Masterson and not-so-easily spooked David Abbott fall in love. Problem is, she's an incorporeal spirit who's lost her memory - among other vital signs - in a car crash, and he's the only one who can see or hear her. But not touch, which has a frustrating effect on blooming romance.

Director Mark Waters found funny new wrinkles in the Disney family comedy formula with his ``Freaky Friday'' remake and, with ``Mean Girls,'' refreshed the overworked high-school comedy genre. He, too, believes that ``Just Like Heaven'' had just the right gimmick.

``The really great romantic comedies have a great obstacle,'' Waters says. ``Like in 'Tootsie,' he's falling in love with a woman, but she thinks he's a woman. There's something built-in that's pretty serious.

``The ones that are bad, which are most, have a false contrivance as their obstacle. There are a whole lot of movies that are based on the 'you- lied-to-me' second act. 'You didn't tell me you were a reporter' or something. Or there's the misunderstanding, like she's having sex with some other guy, but she's not. That's just lame. There's not a mountain between you - what's stopping you two kids from hooking up? Whereas, in this movie, it's a doozy of an obstacle.''

Yes, but also a whale of a contrivance. A tried-and-true one, for sure; ghostly romantic fantasies with varying degrees of humor are a movie staple that includes Noel Coward's ``Blithe Spirit'' as well as ``The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,'' ``Heaven Can Wait,'' ``Ghost'' and ``Truly Madly Deeply.''

``When you go through a contrivance to get a half-assed kind of obstacle, what's the point?'' Waters clarifies. ``We have a huge contrivance, but it leads to a great obstacle.''

Concept is just the starting point, of course. ``Just Like Heaven'' went through many stages of development since producers Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald obtained the rights to its source novel, Marc Levy's ``If Only It Were True.'' Which, by the way, was French and not funny.

A number of high-paid screenwriters took a crack at it before Peter Tolan (TV's ``Rescue Me'') and then Leslie Dixon (``Outrageous Fortune,'' the ``Freaky'' remake) did their final credited drafts. Producer Parkes says Tolan came up with the one serious idea that helped ground the comedy emotionally.

``In the original book, Mark's character was just a guy who rented that apartment and encountered the spirit,'' Parkes explains. ``Peter suggested that he could be a guy who was silently shouldering his own burden of loss, so that spiritually and emotionally he was dead while the girl was near physical death.

``Often times, finding a serious idea that can be the foundation of a romantic comedy can be the difference between something that flies off like so many spinning plates or something that has some emotional weight underneath it. It also leads to the kind of actor that you can get for that role. What is often the case in a standard romantic comedy is that it's all about the-girl-and-the-boy-is-kind-of-fun vibe, but with this, you could go for an actor of real depth.''

Widely admired for his serious acting chops in such independent films as ``You Can Count on Me'' and ``We Don't Live Here Anymore,'' Ruffalo indeed brought a real actor's perspective to what is often a paint-by-numbers assignment.

``I just thought that, as much as we could switch gears, the more fun it would be,'' Ruffalo says. ``Really grind into the low, intense love stuff, and death and those kinds of big themes, then just go way out there on physical comedylike stuff. And the way to do that is just be incredibly honest with each scene.''

Dixon says the key to writing imaginative scenes for romantic comedies is to quarantine oneself from the ``Must Love Dogs'' mediocrity the genre has sunk into.

``This is going to sound absolutely awful, but maybe what makes me a better person to work on them occasionally is that I don't pay to see them,'' she says. ``And the reason I don't is that they don't stand up to Billy Wilder. You're always disappointed, you always want more, and I just get disheartened. For every 'Tootsie,' there are 500 bad ones.''

Trying to emulate the sidesplitting nature of such classics as ``Some Like It Hot'' is vital, Waters figures. Not just to keep the genre's natural female audience happy, but to avoid the dreaded male-boring curse of the chick flick.

``A lot of people say that they're doing a romantic comedy and it's an excuse to not actually be funny,'' Waters notes. ``Y'know, as long as it's kind of sweet and cute, it's OK. I bring in a round table of comedy writers and we try to make all of my movies as aggressively funny as they can be, not just on romantic comedy levels.

``Boys don't mind the fact that they get emotionally involved in the movie,'' he adds, ``as long as that happened while they were laughing.''

And a sure way to keep those laughs coming is to keep the characters abrasively at odds with one another for as long as possible. This is not an easy thing to do in modern Hollywood, when both audiences and the studio executives who pander to them often want likability above all else from their movie stars.

Actors like Ruffalo and Witherspoon, though, know that they do their best work when messing with their characters' shortcomings, and are therefore more attracted to roles defined by flaws than by virtues.

``I loved the beginning where we get to fight like cats and dogs,'' Witherspoon says. ``We had so much fun doing that! Well, I don't know if he enjoyed it as much as I did. I love having that antagonistic relationship in the beginning, and being equally as strong as each other and bullheaded. It kind of reminded me of a Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn-type movie.''

Waters says that there was no pressure from ``Heaven's'' distributor, DreamWorks,to make the leads behave nicer.

``When you cast charming actors, who are naturally kind of likable, then the audience can accept the fact that they're doing unlikable things,'' the director says.

In the end, it's a given that a successful romantic comedy depends on chemistry between the leading actors, and how moviegoers are inclined to react to them. While this can bring box-office rewards to even the lamest Meg Ryan or Jennifer Lopez vehicle, it takes a different kind of compatibility, that between director and material, to make a good movie.

``Both 'Freaky Friday' and 'Mean Girls' were movies, not unlike this, that you went into with low expectations, but I was delighted by,'' producer MacDonald reveals. ``Romantic comedy is delicate, in developing the story, in casting, getting the right two people together, and directing it. In this one, even more so, because it deals with life and death, too. It could be melodramatic in the wrong hands, and (Waters) needed to balance these elements. I think he was able to let both things live, and that it had an emotional reality but it never let go of its comic heart.''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

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3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) On a Higher Plane

`Just Like Heaven' takes a spirited approach to romantic comedy

(2) Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo in ``Just Like Heaven''

(3) - Reese Witherspoon