Ghost Story

By RICHARD CORLISS

Movies have always tried to teach the audience lessons: how to live more adventurously, love more expertly, blow things up more noisily. And every now and then, die more beautifully. This holiday season, mortality is much on the minds of ambitious filmmakers. Grim Death will be gargling in dramas about AIDS (Philadelphia), the Nazi Holocaust (Schindler's List), Vietnam (Heaven and Earth) and plain old age (Wrestling Ernest Hemingway). It's apt that the Cardiac Pack is led by My Life, for its writer-director is Bruce Joel Rubin, screenwriter for the postmortem love story Ghost and the death-throe fantasy Jacob's Ladder -- the Jack Kevorkian of '90s Hollywood.

Like all of us, Bob Jones (Michael Keaton) has a death sentence hanging over him. But the clock is ticking faster for Bob: his kidney cancer has spread to his lungs and brain. Nothing can save him, not his youth, his cushy show-biz job, his loving wife (Nicole Kidman) or the child she carries inside her. Nor is he comforted by memories of a childhood disconnected from his working-class parents. So Bob decides to videotape a few remarks to his son-to-be.

Videotape as a kind of immortality: how sweet, how narcissistic, how '90s this notion is. So is this glossy, well-acted movie about a very privileged victim. Because Bob has no problems with money, work, a restless wife or unruly kids, he can spend his time in crash-course therapy, discovering that, yes, his parents really did love him. Moviegoers in dead-end jobs and edgy relationships will wish they could live half as glamorously as Bob Jones dies. This is Final Exit, Hollywood-style: death warmed over.