Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais) is a New York City dentist whose brief death during an operation gives him the ability to see dead people — a “Ghost Town” full of them. He’s enlisted by dead-guy Frank (Greg Kinnear) who wants Pincus to break up his widow’s new relationship with a human rights lawyer — even though Frank wasn’t particularly loyal to her when he was alive. Gwen, his cute and scatterbrained Egyptologist widow, is played by Téa Leoni. In addition to that earthly dilemma, he’s got to figure out how to stop the rest of the door-transcending ghosts from mobbing him to tidy up their unfinished business.

That brief sketch has more than enough ways for the movie to tank. The new guy’s a total slimeball, right? Pincus will eagerly take on the mission of breaking them up and helping out his new ghost friend, right? Pincus and Gwen will be obviously meant for each other, right? Frank will see the error of his ways and disappear to allow the new love to bloom, right? Wrong on all counts.

Apart from the vicarious thrills of Gervais’s performance — he gets to be a jerk in the way you wish you could be on your worst days when you have to smile and be polite anyway — the movie holds up because, at every opportunity it could be cheap or mindless of plot holes, it takes the higher road. Where it could just be the story of two people bumping about for 90 minutes before they embrace, it gives you something a bit smarter and philosophical to take away.

It’s sweet, but not cloying. As Gervais says in the commentary, any performance, dramatic or comic, has to be about empathy for people to like it. “No one wants to be seeing unfeasibly handsome funny clever people doing really well,” he says. “There’s nothing remotely interesting about that.”

There are too many examples of how to make a really bad romantic comedy by deflating a spectacular comic (Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation” or Robin Williams in “What Dreams May Come” in pursuit of some female’s soporific charms. Instead, writer/director David Koepp lets Gervais be anti-social, too-smart-by-half and a narcissist — with stumpy little arms and a dentist’s smock that make him look like a toad, Gervais notes — in the same vein that made his David Brent, on “The Office,” so enjoyable.

Romantic comedies are generally pap. They serve two, diametrically opposed purposes. One: Be inoffensive enough to get unsure first-daters into the theater, sappy enough to push the action in the chairs toward hand-holding and dim-lit gazing, and uninteresting enough to keep it there. Two: To likewise be inoffensive, sappy and uninteresting enough to serve as background for a gal to ponder her own recent dumping — or for her to do so in the presence of sympathetic friends.

Not so for “Ghost Town” — which should be a lesson. If you’re going to go through the hassle of making a movie, why pander to audiences you don’t expect to watch it? After all, if you really want to do a lot of hard work without notice, there’s always dentistry.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.