“In a comedy, it helps to highlight what was already there,” said Ivan Reitman. The filmmaker, who died on Saturday at the age of 75, had found the right formula for his cardboard SOS Fantômes (1984): summoning and unleashing spirits, making Bill Murray a recalcitrant star, taking humor seriously with big budgets. America’s biggest hit for a comedy at the time, the film, Ghostbusters in VO, is a fetish for boomers riveted when they were children in front of the VHS and loudly singing the title song of Ray Parker («Who ya gonna call ?») at business school parties. Without SOS Fantomes, no Men in Black and certainly not from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to see the way the Avengers and consorts approach their special effects monsters with the same punchlines.
Ivan Reitman was born to Hungarian Jewish parents in the former Czechoslovakia. His mother was a survivor of Auschwitz. The family emigrated to Toronto in 1950. Reitman quickly turned to cinema, a regressive vein: horror comedy Cannibal Girls (“Horror was not natural to him and to do SOS Fantômes was perfect for him.” will say David Cronenberg, for whom he will produce his youth films Chills et Rage), then just comedies like Stop rowing, you’re on the sand (1979) et the Bluess (1981). Films which, with American College (1978) by John Landis (produced by Reitman), cemented the success on the big screen of the first generation of the TV troublemakers of the Saturday Night Live (Murray, John Belushi) and announces that, later, of the band to Judd Apatow. His sidekick Harold Ramis, actor and co-author of SOS Fantomes, said that “in Jewish comedy, Woody Allen embodies anger and our films embody heroism”. Under the potcheries of SOS Fantomes, where a fridge is a door to another dimension, there is a clear way to banish, clean up a tainted past (ghosts, invariably those of criminals) without question, and defend small business against bureaucrats (the Reitman’s father ran his own car wash business), ending up cheering from New York City.
Reitman will then make other films that will not have the same cultural resonance (Six days, seven nights (1998), Evolution (2001) as a barely avowed variation on SOS Fantomes, but with aliens) and, culminating in the strange informal trilogy Twins (1988), Kindergarten Cop (1990) et Junior (1994). Each time it is a question of bending the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger under a burlesque pretext (having Danny De Vito as a twin, managing the kids, being pregnant), but without ever transcending the initial idea. He will remain a more or less smart producer (Stop or my mother will shoot! (1992), Beethoven (1992), Space Jam (1996), In the Air (2009), whose last effort will be devoted to yet another resurrection of her baby: overseeing Ghostbusters: Legacy (2021), directed by his son Jason Reitman and yet another confirmation that a specter is haunting the West, that of nostalgia.