Jonathan Rivers is a husband, a father and - given that everyone he meets dies almost immediately - not a guy you want to invite into your book club.

Rivers is the hero of the inane ghost story, "White Noise," an architect (and, judging from the house where he lives, not a good one) who is grieving over the death of his wife. Then, a stranger tells him he receives communications from the dead - blurry, indistinct messages that come to him over the radio or computer - and instead of saying, "Yeah, that could be somebody from the Great Beyond chatting with us, but it could also be you trying to listen to a Norah Jones song on an AM radio station that your antennae isn't strong enough to tune," Jonathan immediately buys it.

"White Noise" throws in a lot of excess baggage - a serial killer, a string of missing women, clues to a mystery, confused family dynamics - all of which obscures anything that could have been scary or interesting about Jonathan's situation.

Within five minutes after seeing the movie with a friend, he and I had come up with five ways the story could have played out that would have been fresher than the direction it chooses, and "White Noise" can't even decide how it feels about some of the basic questions it raises: If dead relatives begin chatting us up, are they doing it to help us or creep us out? Is there a difference between the paranormal and the boogeyman? If the dead are powerful enough to communicate with us, wouldn't they be powerful enough to make it look better than staticky TV reception in Helena, Mont., circa 1945?

But the most crucial flaw in "White Noise" is its complete lack of a funnybone. Keaton gives one of his I-used-to-do-comedy-but-now-I-sob-quietly-while-sitting-on-the-edge-of- a-bed-in-tasteful-rooms performances, and the movie is equally humorless. In particular, Keaton's approach to the paranormal stuff is somber and off-key, like if you went to a putt-putt course and started mourning the fate of the golf balls.

I mean, if you're going to be yapping with the dead and, you know, exchanging instant messages with angels, at least have some fun with it. Acknowledge that it's all a little crazy and then move on. A little skepticism would have gone a long way in this movie, because if the characters don't pause to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, we are forced to do the guffawing for them.