DOES Busting Make Me Feel Good?
Ghostbusters / directed by Paul Feig
Suffice it to say that I’m pretty sure the sexist backlash to the Ghostbusters re-boot, unleashed even before the film was released, is sourced from the same rancid stream of American manhood from which the Trump campaign draws its sordid sustenance. In this light, the battles of the new, distaff quartet of ‘busters against hordes of mostly male ghosts can be viewed as an eerie metaphor for the film’s own cultural status; at some level, you’re going to cheer these ladies on, no matter what, because they’re fighting the good fight.
The new Ghostbusters is an unstable but mostly functional mix of cautious deference to the original, improved, heady special effects, charismatic comic actresses, and hit-and-miss scriptwriting. It’s a film that’s trying to have fun and not take itself too seriously - but there are too many occasions where this impulse is taken too far and the film finds itself foundering in predictable or otherwise stale scenes. If the original Ghostbusters was relatively successful at combining dry wit with an eerie atmosphere, this new Ghostbusters doesn’t seem interested in sustaining any particular feel beyond an off-kilter goofball charm.
As Erin Gilbert, a scientist who has long suppressed her youthful interest in the paranormal, Kristen Wiig is the closest thing the film has to an audience surrogate, as she gets pulled back into the world of spirits by her old friend Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy), a more committed believer. Wiig’s off-kilter, nervous presence is well-fitted to her role as a scientist who lets friendship and passion draw her out of respectable academia into the ghost-hunting game (plus, on the cusp of gaining tenure, she gets fired from her professorship when her university finds out about her youthful ghostly speculations). Melissa McCarthy is her opposite, unwaveringly enthusiastic about the paranormal and generally outrageous; it’s a variant of a Melissa McCarthy character we’ve seen before, but like Wiig she’s good enough that you also feel like you’re seeing something fresh.
Kate McKinnon as Jillian Holtzmann weaves another strand of deliberate eccentricity into the mix. Of the four, her quirkiness can at times seem the most forced, but there are likewise a few moments, including when she’s more at rest, that she conveys a fresh, casual weirdness that’s not necessarily funny but very much alive; her performance ends up being as much tantalizing as amusing. And as MTA employee Patty Tolan, Leslie Jones may be the greatest casualty of the film’s unevenness; in light of the controversial role of Ernie Hudson in the original, one has to assume that her casting and specific role must have been conscious choices - but the film never quite frees itself from the gravitational pull of the question as to why the one non-scientist member of the team had to be a street-smart African American woman. Jones is as funny as the others, but the cliche she must operate within seems an unnecessary, if not outright retrograde, inhibition.
There are a handful of cameos by actors from the original Ghostbusters. Most run from harmless to mildly amusing, but the deployment of Bill Murray as a dour, ghost-debunking specialist is a dire waste of the man’s talents; you can feel the film bog down while he’s on screen as even the lowest expectations for casting him in this role give way to the realization that this was just a bad call all around. And while Chris Hemsworth’s turn as the Ghostbusters’ incompetent beefcake secretary is far more successful, it ends up erring in the opposite direction to Murray’s role, running sillier than in needs to be (does his character really have to be too dumb to know how to pick up a phone?).
The movie’s mix of crude, elementary school humor (middle finger jokes, fart jokes) with truly clever lines and patches of surrealism creates an uneven, rather than comprehensive, comic sensibility; it’s almost as if it was deemed more important to keep the jokes coming than to make sure they’re actually funny. I’m as much for pratfalls and physical humor as the next guy, but when the jokes end with easily anticipated, literal falls (whether out of windows or down stairs), it does no one any good. There is sometimes a curious feeling that the film is simulating being funny rather than being funny, trying to get you to laugh by going through energetic motions that seem laugh-inducing but aren’t firing on all cylinders. In their collectivity, the four actresses are more than talented enough to ballast the film through good times and bad; but it’s hard not to have a feeling of great potential wasted. Despite the high production values and impressive special effects, the whole enterprise feels sloppy and choppy, overreliant on the power of its stars and throwing coherence to the ectoplasmic wind.