Beginning with a static shot of a ship arriving at an island and proceeding to trap its protagonist there over information he cannot be allowed to spread, The Ghost Writer invites broad comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island.
But there are no questions of sanity in Roman Polanski’s latest, based on The Ghost, by novelist Thomas Harris (though the book is more roman à clef than novel, depending on one’s feelings about Tony Blair), and billed as an Oscar winner’s “first contemporary thriller in more than 20 years.”
When a ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) is hired to complete the autobiography of former British PM Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), he quickly discovers that another writer preceding him died under potentially suspicious circumstances and that Lang is about to be charged with war crimes.
|
The Ghost Writer
Directed by Roman Polanski |
As he revises and expands the manuscript, navigating the treacherous professional and romantic waters of Lang’s coterie, including Mrs. Ruth Lang (Olivia Williams) and Adam’s personal assistant, Amelia (Kim Cattrall), he comes to suspect that the truth about the Prime Minister’s deeds is buried in his biography.
From the outset, Ghost Writer aims to be timely and topical, lingering on an airport’s elevated threat level signage and the security procedures around important people, but while it professes to be about a British PM in cahoots with U.S. defense policy (as if this month’s Green Zone did not constitute enough toothless, retrospective denunciation), at heart Polanski’s yarn aspires to the timeless resonance of fallen (and falling) greatness, political intrigue, and romance.
But along with its hot-button issues, the film repeatedly makes veiled references to Polanski himself, sequestered in Switzerland as he awaits possible extradition to Los Angeles for sentencing in a statutory rape case dating back to 1977. The potential for war crimes charges to be leveled against Lang and substantiated by the International Criminal Court means he will have to cloister himself in the United States, where the ICC’s jurisdiction is not recognized, .
“I have better things to do than deal with the police,” says Lang at one point, and one wonders whether one is meant to condemn or commiserate.
The Ghost Writer does – briefly and somewhat subtly – offer an interesting picture of the modern media, a variation on the familiar “network buzzards” trope but without the hyperbole. It also has things to say about celebrity and image management, particularly the fallibility of memory, the pliancy of fact, and the ease with which political figures and other big names can manipulate and reconstruct their histories. It all serves to remind you that Polanski “has a dog in this race,” as Mel Gibson might say.
To nobody’s great surprise, Polanski uses his actors well – if, in Brosnan’s case, far too little. Former Jedi knight McGregor is a dependable lead, and here he is surrounded by talent. Tom Wilkinson plays the maven of a Harvard think-tank, Tim Hutton appears as Lang’s American lawyer, Jim Belushi is cast against type as a curt American publisher, and Sex and the City’s Kim Cattrall faintly renegotiates her usual role without attempting a sudden about-face.
But Olivia Williams steals the show as Ruth Lang, imperious but vulnerable, vitriolic but pained, and very much more afraid than she could ever allow her exterior to reveal. Williams’s performance is equal parts Helen Mirren in The Queen and Meryl Streep (in just about anything), and it gives The Ghost Writer its emotional and dramatic bedrock.
Unfortunately, the ending is a cop-out which dodges the central questions of culpability and responsibility which have driven the entire plot even as it degenerates into the kind of cutesy storytelling at home in Mean Girls and Cruel Intentions. But despite its shortcomings – the full roster of which also includes egregious product placement, a silly investigative climax (consisting of a brief flurry of basic Google searches), and those awkward phone conversations of the sort that only occur in movies – The Ghost Writer acknowledges there are no easy answers.
Polanski reminds us that the talking heads are often full of it as we see the disjuncture between characters’ professed allegiances and their public actions, and – given the current state of political discourse in the West – perhaps that’s enough.