Heart and Souls

And now for something completely different …

I have been urging my lovely wife for years to watch the 1993 movie Heart and Souls with me. Finally last week she did. As expected, she enjoyed it very much and even found it moving.

The movie features a very young and extremely talented Robert Downey Jr., who plays Thomas Reilly. He is befriended as a young boy by the spirits of four people who happened to be killed in a bus accident at the moment he was born. For unknown reasons, their spirits attach to him, and he spends the first six years of his life with four very real but invisible friends, As if by magnetism, they cannot move more than a few feet from him. He can talk and sing with him, no one else knows they are there.

Little Tommy’s parents begin to suspect he is nuts, and fearing that they may be harming him, the four decide they must go invisible on their young friend. In a heart-rending scene, they bid him good bye. Twenty years later they are still attached to him, but he has long forgotten them. An angel comes by to pick them up, assuming they knew why they had been stuck with Tom. They had no clue – someone in heaven screwed up, so that they did not know they could enter Tom’s body and use him to rectify their lives. They were supposed to use him to do the one thing they most regretted not doing while alive. The reluctant angel gives them more time.

The four ghosts are played by Kyra Segwick, who jilted the love of her life before dying; Tom Sizemore, who stole some valuable stamps from a young boy and was trying to make good when he died; Alfre Woodard, who never got to see her kids grow up, and Charles Grodin, a singer who was afraid to perform in front of people. As the story moves forward, Downey has to play each of the other characters as they “enter” him and do what they must do. He also has to come to grips with his own inability to give love to others, most importantly, a girl named Anne, played by Elizabeth Shue (perhaps the only one in the movie not exactly right for the part. She’s a little cold and distant.)

It’s a schlocky chick flick, predictable and emotional. And I loved every minute of it. It is one of my favorite movies of all time. Make of that what you will.

By the way, the scene of the five lead characters moving in harmony down the street singing “Walk Like a Man” is forever imprinted on my brain. It is beautifully done.