Whoopi’s genius alchemises drama into comedy gold
Jerry Zucker’s Ghost (1990)
It’s easy to make fun of Ghost. Sure, Jerry Zucker’s film was an enormous global smash in 1990, topping even Pretty Woman and Home Alone as the box office champ of that year, and managing to scoop five Oscar nominations including Best Picture. Perhaps the very notion of taking it seriously accelerated a backlash against this hokey, shameless piece of storytelling, with its peculiar blend of sudsiness and suspense. But the plain truth is: Ghost gets you, in that low-down way of so many unapologetic tear-jerkers.
Within less than a year, The Naked Gun 2½ (1991) would gleefully alight on Ghost’s notorious pottery sex scene for a spoof teaser – “from the brother of the director of Ghost,” intoned trailer-voice man, solemnly (and accurately). When David Zucker thought this parody up, Jerry lent him the couple’s jukebox for Unchained Melody, so it’s not as if he couldn’t see the funny side. Down in its bones, Ghost consistently laughs at itself, in fact, before we even decide we should. And its main conduit for this is the brilliance of Whoopi Goldberg.
The scene
Murdered banker Sam Wheat (Patrick Swayze) is stalking his old life as a ghost, but can’t be heard or seen by his heartbroken girlfriend Molly (Demi Moore), while she wallows in their ludicrously palatial Manhattan loft (last sale price: $10million). Only fake medium Oda Mae Brown (Goldberg) seems mysteriously equipped with the ability to hear Sam, making this unlikely ally his only intermediary for getting through to Molly, who takes a lot of convincing that she isn’t the victim of a heartless con.
When Molly’s finally buying it, Sam needs to explain to her that the same criminal who shot him has unfinished business in their home. In a three-way scene, he asks Oda Mae to pass on his warnings, word for word. But this isn’t her style. And first there’s a fit of pique to contend with: when Oda Mae tries to explain the film’s whole supernatural conceit with some waffle about Sam being stuck “between worlds”, he scoffs at her logic and almost provokes a walkout.
Why is it so good?
Whoopi Goldberg. It’s that simple. No one else in Ghost disgraces themselves at all – this is arguably the best performance from a luminous Moore, there’s something touchingly vulnerable about Swayze even in his more wooden moments, and Tony Goldwyn’s yuppie villain Carl, a jittery wreck by the end, is way better than he even needs to be.
But from the moment Oda Mae enters the picture, Ghost gains the kind of heaven-sent comic relief that doubles a film’s word of mouth at a stroke, and makes its silliness something a huge audience can feel comfortable embracing. For all that she clearly isn’t far from stereotype as a magical black character fixing yuppie problems, Oda Mae is a glorious vehicle for Goldberg’s near-automatic sense of irony, and she’s so tuned into the character – and these incongruous surroundings – that she barely needs move a muscle to leave you regularly in stitches. She alchemises drama into comedy.
Goldberg barely needs to move a muscle to leave you in stitches
See the way her umbrage with Sam starts off as a prickly dispute, then explodes into a diva’s indignation. But it’s the next bit that’s priceless – her recomposure, donning a kind of Lady Bracknell pout as she sits back down. And she’s gained complete control of the scene during this exchange: regardless of how Sam wants his words relayed, we’ll be doing it her way.
This means her delivering the film’s most meme-able, giff-able line with a stern, low-down gaze and delightful sense of melodrama. “Molly, you in danger, girl”. It has the unmistakable feel of an ad lib, and indeed this was the case – Bruce Joel Rubin’s shooting script had the far more banal, “He’s sayin’ you’re in danger.”
Something in Oda Mae can’t help relishing being the messenger, stuck – ever-complaining as she is – in the midst of this wacko white-folk tragedy.
She builds on that sneaking enjoyment divinely in the next set piece, when Sam needs her to withdraw $4million from a bank account to foil Carl’s schemes, and she rocks up there in a hot pink suit with that pillbox hat to obey instructions. Every part of that sequence is gold – her crazed over smiling, the prim way she keeps asking to keep pens, her schizoid annoyance with Sam. And the pay-off with two nuns outside, into whose clutches she must with near murderous reluctance surrender the cashier’s cheque. It’s all magic.
Behind the scenes
It’s kind of a happy fluke that Goldberg ended up being in Ghost at all. Since her galvanising breakthrough in Spielberg’s The Color Purple (1985), she’d been badly packaged in a string of action comedies, with only the hi-tech spy romp Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986) being a marginally successful vehicle. Even though Oda Mae feels as if she could practically have been written with Whoopi in mind, Jerry Zucker wasn’t in favour of using her.
Even lower down the wish list was Swayze, Paramount’s tenth choice to play Sam – and not Zucker’s pick either, on the basis that the Houston born actor was simply too Texan looking to be a convincing banker, and had just starred in the famously absurd Road House (1989). (“Over my dead body,” were Zucker’s exact words to Rubin when they went to see it.)
Even so, when Swayze’s agent wangled an audition, he succeeded in making everyone cry. And once cast, he went to the wall in ensuring Goldberg got her role – saying, in fact, that he wouldn’t even agree to do it unless they approached her, because he was convinced she’d nail the part exactly as she did.
Its legacy
Ghost took a solid two of those five trophies home – Rubin’s original script won, and Goldberg, up for Best Supporting Actress, became only the second black woman ever to win an acting Oscar, 51 years after Hattie Mcdaniel for Gone with the Wind. Her short, triumphant speech didn’t forget to single out the right people, hailing Swayze as a “stand-up guy”.