Four Ghosts And a Baby

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: HEART AND SOULS

DIRECTOR: RON UNDERWOOD

WRITERS: BRENT MADDOCK, S.S. WILSON, GREGORY HANSEN, ERIK HANSEN

THE BOTTOM LINE: Take bits from It's a Wonderful Life, All of Me, Topper and Ghost. Presto -- a bad popular movie!

Sometimes critics are human -- or a reasonable facsimile thereof. They like a good cry at the movies. They can get all sniffly and teary, just like real people, when somebody falls in love or dies. The candy shell of their heart can melt into chocolate when a kid hugs a whale. What separates critics from you is that inside the chocolate they must nurture the hard nut of cool judgment. They must know the difference between a good cry -- emotion earned by film artistry, as in E.T. or Greta Garbo's Camille or, for that matter, The Secret Garden -- and a bad one.

No question, Heart and Souls is a cry movie in every stitch of its elaborate plot. In 1959 four strangers -- a working mother (Alfre Woodard), a petty thief (Tom Sizemore), a waitress in love (Kyra Sedgwick) and a timid opera singer (Charles Grodin) -- board a San Francisco bus and die when the driver swerves to avoid a car. In that car, at that moment, a woman gives birth to a boy, Thomas; and in his body the spirits of the four dead passengers are trapped. Today the ghosts have learned that Thomas (Robert Downey Jr.) can perform one act for each of them that will write a happy ending to their interrupted life stories. One by one, the spirits take over his body so that, as their agent, he can reunite a family, return stolen property, track down a missing sweetheart and have a musical triumph.

Heart and Souls could itself be a low sort of triumph. At a sneak preview the audience cheered when one spirit got his star-spangled wish, and they applauded at the end. The house was so streaked with humid tears it nearly had to be hosed down. But this movie is a bad cry, for calculation steams off it like skunk musk. It is packed with stale "sure-fire" routines, like the rendition of a rock-'n'-roll oldie (here Walk like a Man) and a funny car crash (which comes a reel or two after the fatal crash -- yikes!). The screenplay's big achievement is to create four people who are already dead and then give each a death scene.

Buried in this vat of feel-good glop are two piquant themes. One is a child's need to believe that invisible friends are real. Early on, when the four ghosts desert child Thomas and tell him, "Just be with your mommy and daddy," you can read the panic in his eyes; he is as bereft as Baby Jessica. The other theme is an adult's need to believe that our final worldly departure might come only after we have made peace with others and, thus, ourselves. That's worth a tear. Even a critic will cry for what might have been: a nice film inside a bad one, like a ghost of its better self.

See? Critics can be human, even when they watch a movie that isn't. R.C.