Heaven is a place on Earth: a third-floor San Francisco apartment with a view of the bay, apparently
I always thought I was a big fan of Mark Ruffalo. Ever since he hit mainstream popularity in The Avengers, I’ve always made sure to catch his latest features, from Now You See Me to Spotlight to Dark Waters (an incredibly underrated legal drama). And of course, there were his stand-out roles in Zodiac and Shutter Island. Ruffalo was a cool actor. He worked with David Fincher and Todd Haynes and Martin Scorsese. He—
He was a rom-com star?
Yes, yes, I’m well aware that I shouldn’t be shocked by the fact that handsome middle-aged actors played heart-throbs twenty years ago, but I always am regardless (see also: Chris Evans, Matthew McConaughey, et al).
What I’m saying is that it didn’t take much for my girlfriend to convince me to watch the romantic comedy film Just Like Heaven, starring Ruffalo and Reese Witherspoon. In fact, she didn’t even have to tell me the premise of the film, which was a lot of fun especially during the first act as I got to piece together what the movie was about on the fly.
After E.R. doctor Elizabeth (Witherspoon) is put in an indefinite coma following a car crash, her apartment is rented out by her family to David (Ruffalo), a disgusting wretch of a man who drinks beer and doesn’t use coasters—a capital offence in Elizabeth’s eyes. Turns out that Elizabeth is haunting her apartment from the hospital room where her body lies out of action, and the pair strike up a, well… what’s the opposite of a friendship?
I hope my girlfriend doesn’t read too much into this, but I think my favourite parts of rom-coms are the parts where the two leads despise each other. In simple narrative terms, this hatred creates the biggest amount of change possible for the characters because by the end of the movie they will inevitably be in love.
They also make for the funniest scenes in the movie before things start getting serious and gushy later on. In Just Like Heaven, this is the sequence where David is attempting to exorcise Elizabeth from ‘his’ apartment, before realising that she’s actually still alive. It’s both a fun twist on a haunted house/apartment story and the classic rom-com formula, made funnier by the fact that only David can see Elizabeth.
At this point in the story both David and the audience are led to believe that Elizabeth is dead. It initially creates an oddly sharp sense of heartbreak because while it’s obvious these two will fall in love, one of them is a ghost, so what are they going to do about that? The discovery that Elizabeth is still alive is genuinely elating.
Unlike The Proposal (which I recently watched), there’s a sweetness to the relationship between David and Elizabeth. It’s like the writers knew that by creating a tragically untenable situation for a romantic relationship from the beginning, they could afford to have a little more fun with the scenario without sacrificing a sense of stakes. (Stand-out moments include Elizabeth possessing David to stop him from getting drunk and David performing impromptu surgery in a restaurant using Elizabeth’s expertise.)
This underlying sense of tragedy is what makes the (spoilers) ending so good. Maybe I’m not well-versed enough in rom-coms to make this statement, but it seems like most don’t keep their leads from ever even touching until the last shot of the movie. This delayed gratification really worked for me. It made the relationship seem earned by both parties.
The movie also avoided the rom-com cliché of having the couple ‘break up’ at the end of the second act, substituting the moment with the reveal that Elizabeth’s sister has signed some papers that will take her off life-support, signalling an oncoming end to her and David’s relationship. It could be argued that the beat doesn’t hit quite as hard as a break-up would, but at it least avoids the tedium of going through the motions re: breaking up and getting back together.
The movie has a bonkers third act involving a plan to steal Elizabeth’s comatose body from the hospital—a crime that I don’t think even the 45th President of the United States could walk away from—that sidesteps logic and reasoning in favour of thrills and tension, but I’ll forgive it. Just Like Heaven isn’t exactly a study in realism on film and that’s okay.
Overall, I had a really good time with this movie. It’s corny and a little dated in terms of how it represents the rental market (I would love to know how much Elizabeth/David’s apartment would cost to rent in 2024), but Ruffalo and Witherspoon give genuinely funny and heartfelt performances that kept me engaged and chuckled for most of the run time.
***
Thanks for reading my Just Like Heaven film review. If you liked it, consider buying me a cup of coffee at https://ko-fi.com/kieranobrien
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