'Over Her Dead Body' Is Enlivened by a Free Spirit

Is there love after death? Around Hollywood, that's like asking if there's valet parking at Mr. Chow's. Even a cursory survey of the available research material -- "Topper," "Blithe Spirit," "Wuthering Heights," "Ghost," "Heaven Can Wait," "Close to Heaven," the recent "P.S. I Love You" -- nullifies the notion that mere mortality might ever get in the way of romance. After all, it's not as if life comes with end credits.

And yet, when we talk about "movie magic," we're not talking about the casual ability to suspend the divine rule book. We mean the screen's capacity to cloud men's minds. To perform sleight of hand, using smoke and mirrors. To execute an alchemical process on the most leaden or ridiculous of plots and devices. Take "Casablanca": Why in the world would the Nazis have cared about letters of transit signed by Gen. de Gaulle? Before you can give it much thought, Ingrid Bergman walks into the room, and the issue is moot. How about "Pretty Woman"? Isn't the premise about a hooker-turned-Cinderella just a tiny bit fatuous? Yes, but Julia Roberts laughs off all the arguments. Is "Juno" overrated? Okay, let's not go there.

"Over Her Dead Body," which should be the biggest tuna on that barge known as the weekend movie menu, has a fatuous, overabused storyline and a larger set of gestures than Cecil B. De Mille. But it also has Lake Bell -- the actress, not the nautical alarm system -- who blows into "Over Her Dead Body" the way the aforementioned Roberts blew into 1988's "Mystic Pizza." She takes over the screen. She is unkempt yet Botticellian. In her imperfectly beautiful way, she suggests Carole Lombard. As a comedian, she is enough of a distraction that you forgive all the inanities occurring around her. And there are many.

"Over Her Dead Body" is -- one supposes -- Eva Longoria Parker's movie, although the "Desperate Housewives" star is uncategorically eclipsed by her co-star, and playing the least sympathetic figure in the movie. Wearing a crescendo of hair and enough bronzer to alter the complexion of Finnish Lapland, Parker's Kate marches around the site of her pending nuptials with all the cuddliness of Otto von Bismarck. "It's your wedding day! Relax!" urges her laid-back veterinarian fiance, Henry (Paul Rudd), who apparently has never seen an episode of "Bridezillas." When a 500-pound ice sculpture lands on Kate, sending her to the antechamber of paradise, a sigh of contentment is heard from caterers all over the country.

There's a great deal of forced naturalism in "Over Her Dead Body" which is of the standard-issue, aren't-we-quirky-but-not-too-quirky-for-cable air of premeditated spontaneity. Except for Bell. She really is a natural, or as natural as one can be in a movie in which a dead fiancee returns to demolish her dear bridegroom's love life. As Ashley the psychic -- who is also a caterer -- Bell mixes eccentricity with warmth, creating a character so charming we don't stop to ask The Questions: What qualifies the goofy Ashley as a psychic (or a caterer!)? Why would someone as rumpled and easygoing as Henry agree, even at the request of his sister, Chloe (the winning Lindsay Sloane), to visit a clairvoyant like Ashley, especially to make contact with someone like Kate? None of it makes a lick of sense, not logically, emotionally or dramatically. But we have Bell, and everything's cool.

At this point, we the reviewer are experiencing buyer's remorse. Have we invested too much in Lake Bell? Is she really as convincing as we thought? Our fascination, we think (and hope), is less about a hormonal response than the phenomenon of the camera: How does an actress of less-than-classic beauty, whose features, in any objective sense, are overlarge and out of balance (the same was said of Sophia Loren), exist as such a pure creature of cinema? That movie stars are another species is not an original thought. But when one comes along, you know it. Anthropologically speaking.

The comedy doesn't nearly live up to its star, who, while a bit of a throwback to the era of effervescent screwball humor, is in a movie swirling in a vortex of formula. The momentum that's built as Ashley and Henry get on the same romantic track, and as Kate tries to derail them, starts to slow when Ashley finds the resolve to stand her ground rather than run comically away.

Writer-director Jeff Lowell must have sensed this, because he appends two sort-of subtexts that serve as movie applique rather than plot engines. One involves Dan, Ashley's catering partner and a gay man (Jason "American Pie" Biggs is actually quite good) with a secret. The other involves Chloe, who's a bit of a kleptomaniac around Henry's office, steals people's animals and does generally wacky things. She's enchanting but superfluous. What's interesting is that she's a free-spirited woman in a movie already built around one. How much individuality can one movie support? No one ever said there was a limit on personality, and Chloe supplies plenty of it.

And all this follows a year in which women were relegated to supporting roles, if they were lucky. (How does one explain Cate Blanchett's Best Actress nomination for "Elizabeth: The Golden Age"? Poverty of choice.) "Over Her Dead Body," whose title might have explained the entire, dire state of women on film in 2007, has three very capable actresses in prominent roles. It may make one of them a star. There are certainly worse ways to start off a year in movies