©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection
Full disclosure: it pains me deeply to refer to Heart and Souls as forgotten because I did not forget. The 1993 fantasy-comedy about four spirits in limbo who are tethered to a man born the minute they died (general light-hearted fair) was on constant rotation in my house growing up. Maybe because it was usually available to borrow at our local library; maybe because I was a child with perpetual existential anxiety. Who can say? The point is I thought this movie that debuted at #6 at the box office and has a 55% on Rotten Tomatoes was the most popular film in America and its stars—luminous Alfre Woodard, effervescent Kyra Sedgwick, and a young, funny Robert Downey, Jr.—were Hollywood’s most powerful royalty. Frankly, I’m still not convinced this isn’t the case. Perception becomes memory and memory becomes truth.
Perhaps that’s why, when I think about movies that take on a different meaning as we grapple with mortal peril in isolation, Heart and Souls immediately came to mind. Like Death Becomes Her and Beetlejuice, the film uses slapstick-y comedy to tackle matters of unfinished business in life and the daunting prospect of the afterlife. And, like those two films, it makes being stuck in limbo seem a bit like quarantine in a way that might actually be helpful.
In case you always found the VHS of Heart and Souls checked out every time you visited the Woodlawn Library in the mid-’90s (sorry!), I’ll summarize the plot for you. In 1959, a bus crashes, killing the four strangers on board: working mom of three Penny (Woodard); Julia (Sedgwick), a waitress torn between her hometown love and her city life; aspiring opera singer Harrison (Charles Grodin); and Milo (Tom Sizemore), a thief experiencing a crisis of conscience. The bus driver (David Paymer) immediately ascends into the heavens, but the four passengers are pulled into the orbit of a baby who will eventually grow up to be Thomas (Downey). The four spirits spend much of Thomas’s youth entertaining him and each other, never able to stray more than a few feet from the child. But after realizing that a kid with seemingly imaginary friends is going to have a rough go of it, they make themselves invisible. (Isn’t it amazing how ghosts always seem to figure out how to ghost even if they don’t have a Handbook for the Recently Deceased? Seems like a flaw in the logic until you remember all your exes also figured out how to ghost even though they were morons. Life, uh, finds a way!)
The four spirits spend the next 30 years dragged around by an unaware Thomas, tethered to his life but unable to interact with him or the outside world. Then the bus driver shows up and tells them an angel was supposed to give them instructions decades ago: They’re connected with Thomas because they have to use him to complete some piece of business unfinished in their lifetimes. Whoops. As in Beetlejuice, it’s not death that’s the biggest inconvenience when it comes to dying, but rather bureaucracy. Now armed with a strict time limit, the spirits have to re-engage with Thomas and convince him to help them tie up loose ends.
In my 9,000th rewatch of Heart and Souls, I’m thinking about the terrifying dullness of ghost life. Sure, the four spirits travel with Thomas everywhere he goes and witness his life like they’re binge-watching a show for eternity, but without the possibility of engaging (or even turning the show off), the meaning of existence starts to ebb away. Personally, this is my worst-case scenario. I do not want to be a ghost and I especially do not want to be a ghost that doesn’t even have a job to do.
I used to think that the ultimate indignity was finding yourself in the afterlife with yet another to-do list. I worked hard my whole life, contributing to Social Security, volunteering for important causes, showing up at Zoom happy hours, only to die and be put back to work scaring people? No thanks! You’re telling me I have a ghost boss and ghost progress reports and a ghost performance improvement plan? Unsubscribe. Not to be ungrateful, but I’d like to be an independently wealthy ghost with no need for gainful employment. Or an influencer ghost whose whole thing is going on vacation. Or at least, that’s what I thought I wanted. But after watching four spirits dragged through time, I’m coming around to the idea of accepting a ghost job. I will be updating my Afterlife LinkedIn.
Of course, the tragic irony of Heart and Souls is that the four spirits do have a job to do; they just don’t know it. At first it seemed to me that there was a connection to be made between the terrifying dullness of quarantine times and the drive to stay productive, to hone a new skill, to start all the sourdough. But the jobs these spirits are saddled with have nothing to do with making lemonade out of the lemons of their circumstances. Instead, they have to mend the places of brokenness inside themselves and between themselves and the world. Oh, you know, a simple task.
Take, for instance, Woodard’s Penny, a character and performance bursting with life, humor, and pathos. She found herself on the ill-fated bus because she was on her way to work as a night operator, leaving her three children to be looked after by a friend. Separated from life, Penny can’t provide monetarily or parentally for her children anymore, but her unfinished business still revolves around them. She just needs to check in on them, to know that though they experienced the unimaginable, they are somehow okay. When she does finally get to see her grown son and young grandchild, she’s so overwhelmed she initially can’t do anything but gape in wonder. Woodard’s performance is nothing short of a miracle throughout the film: She is maternal and silly; someone whose melancholy is never far from the surface but whose joyful life-force is bone deep. In the resolution of her plot line, all the disparate threads coalesce. We watch her find something more than peace; she achieves transcendence. It’s astonishing.
This moment is reminiscent of Meg Ryan’s similar incredulous joy at the conclusion of Sleepless in Seattle. In both scenes, the character is awestruck when she realizes the thing she wanted actually came true—the thing she worked and wished for so hard is not only within her grasp, but manifested. It’s a suggestion that the insurmountable task of bridging the gaps between us can actually be accomplished, no matter the forces that separate us. Simply put, maybe the job that we’re stuck here doing is the extraordinary work of connection.
