Column:

‘Dead Body’ comes up short

By Dan Moore

Published Feb. 8, 2008

Is there any genre — besides soft-core women’s prison pornography — more dependent on convention than the romantic comedy? It’s not an accusation so much as an observation. The best romantic comedies, such as “When Harry Met Sally...” or “Bringing Up Baby” are, formally, not much different from the genre’s weaker specimens. They just understand the form better and fill it with considerably better content.

Among those weaker specimens is this week’s “Over Her Dead Body,” a slapdash entry with so many high-concept gimmicks in mind that an atmosphere of romance is replaced by one of utter confusion.

Convention one: boy meets girl in some strange way. Check. Henry (Paul Rudd), desperate to contact his dead fiancé Kate (Eva Longoria Parker), reluctantly meets with a psychic, Ashley (Lake Bell), and falls in love.

But “Body” isn’t satisfied with following Henry and Ashley, or delving into the odd circumstances that go with falling for someone who’s trying to contact the love of your life. Instead, it makes Kate into a real ghost, a vapid cross between “Topper” and “Desperate Housewives,” out to sabotage their budding relationship. With half the film’s running time spent establishing her ghostliness and setting up some admittedly funny set pieces capitalizing on that fact, there’s no time to set up convention two.

Convention two: boy and girl fall in love. There will be casual dates, there will be slapstick mishaps, there will be warmth and tenderness, there will be a feeling of overall rightness. Paul Rudd has one of the best romantic comedy leads around, possessing the rare, all-important ability to appear likeable to both men and women, and Lake Bell musters enough quirkiness to fill her role as a wacky psychic. But the top-heaviness of the ghost-fiancée gimmick leaves them with so little time together that their romance is completely unbelievable.

Convention three: boy and girl are thrust apart over a misunderstanding. Here’s the tricky one. The best examples of the genre fit this in naturally. They make it seem inevitable given the trajectory of the first third of the movie. “Body,” like so many misfires before it, creates a coincidence from thin air and, worse yet, contrives its lead characters’ reactions to create maximum awkwardness, character development be damned. A remarkably thorough diary and an absurd gay friend subplot are just two of the deus ex machina that keep our would-be lovers apart, and in the end we’re left to wonder about convention four.

Convention four: we want boy and girl to get together, and they do. This is the fundamental area in which “Body” fails as anything but a mediocre, hit-or-miss comedy. You can have your strange gimmicks; you can have your star play a ghost, or a housewife, or whatever. But if, in the end, nobody cares whether or not your boy and girl get together, well, that’s a problem.