The Ghost Writer

To listen to a Podcast of this review: http://zyx.podbean.com/category/podcast/

Once upon a time director Roman Polanski was acclaimed for his films, but these days it’s his Michael Jackson-like personal life that captures the most attention. The final cut of his latest movie, The Ghost Writer, was completed at his chalet in Switzerland where Polanski is under house arrest, facing possible extradition for a raping a 13 year old girl more than three decades ago. You can’t watch this film without feeling the pressure of that electronic tag and the film maker’s torment.

The Ghost Writer is a political thriller set in post-Bush America, but it’s mostly about Brits. The main character is, in fact, a ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) who is hired to perform emergency surgery on the ponderous memoir of a former British Prime Minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). In drilling down through the non-smoldering rubble of Lang’s autobiography, the ghost stumbles across layers of extra-legal shenanigans during the Iraq war. To ghost or to become an investigative journalist, that is the question, and therein lies the film’s dramatic, ever shuffling coil.

Ghost Writer is an elegant, slow-build story painted in minimalist shades of rain and shadow, more Hitchcock than Polanski. This film has none of the sudden, shockingly cruel violence seen in some other Polanski films like Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby, although it does have its fair share of genuinely creepy treachery, venom and malice. Each of the main characters is perfectly and glaringly camouflaged by English decorum, revealing themselves only through the occasional flare of idiosyncrasy or Mamet-like bursts of dialog. Lang and his gang have many dirty little secrets, surprisingly few of which are sexual and several of which are not so little.

McGregor’s ghost has no name in this movie, perhaps to establish his bona fides. Although he hates Adam Lang, he accepts an absurdly large contract to ghost the former PM’s memoirs because, well, it’s absurdly large. But, of course, there’s always a catch, and this film makes a cottage industry of them.

For starters, the man who wrote the original manuscript, the prior ghost, is dead. His manuscript is now kept in a locked file cabinet at Lang’s chic fortress and when our ghost tries to spirit it away, a sophisticated security system all but pulls up the draw bridge. If this is what happens over a book, it’s hard to imagine what top secret protections must be like. But McGregor is so well grounded and balanced as an actor that he takes all this monkey business in stride, raising only the slightest of eyebrows. He does a nice job of bringing the audience along with him as he reluctantly connects all the dots.

Brosnan, on the other hand, doesn’t ever get inside Lang’s skin, let alone under ours. He has the look of authority down cold, to be sure, and the arrogance and brittle weariness of the privileged. But beyond a 1000 watt Tony Blair-style smile, all he really does is strut and fret. It’s hard to say whether this is intended as savage caricature or it’s simply the best he could muster. The most interesting thing about this man is his wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), a coldly charming Machiavellian princess with a seemingly infinite number of sharp-edges. Her close encounters with our ghost and various non-ghosts are some of the film’s most electric moments.

And so it goes. Polanski set his film in the US but couldn’t actually film here because he’d be arrested. Instead, he created the places he wanted cinematically, local tourism boards be damned. The seascapes and dunes, the restless grey waves under a slightly darker shade of sky, were filmed on the German North Sea and digitally windowed into a set built in Berlin. There’s something disturbing in knowing that what we take for the real deal is completely made up, and that this can be done so convincingly.

The Ghost Writer shows us that our society works the same way except the goal isn’t entertainment but political and economic control, and the product isn’t a movie, it’s history. Polanski has given us an exile’s black Valentine, a stiletto of rage at the high crimes committed in the name of freedom by government, business and the gentle folks in the Intelligence community. In the end, we’re left with the chill of the restless grey waves and the trackless dunes, and not much else.

Overall rating: Good, not great -- 3.5 stars out of 5

Story: Engaging but slow. Not much new in this suspense thriller about corruption at the highest levels, but the film is elegantly crafted and that makes it different. These aesthetics also apply to the conspiracy theory genre and such films as All the President’s Men, State of Play, JFK, Capitalism: A Love Story and Manchurian Candidate.

Plusses: McGregor and Williams are excellent; you never want them to stop. Many implausible plot points are smoothed over by sharp dialog delivered in British accents and beautiful, minimalist cinematography. Fine cameo by 90+ year old Eli Wallach.

Minuses: A dawdling plot with a musical score that is way too jaunty for the subject – but at least it provides respite from the film’s resolutely monotonous tone.