There’s a shot in The Ghost Writer that says a lot about director Roman Polanski. In it, a worker is gathering sea oats and beach grass that the gusty wind has blown onto the deck. As he places it in a wheelbarrow, the wind again blows it back out and scatters it across the deck.
As hard as Polanski tries, the wind keeps blowing his demons out into full public view. The only way he has ever known to deal with that is to make movies, and good ones like The Ghost Writer.
Few directors have as solid an understanding of how to make a good thriller than Polanski, and his new film, The Ghost Writer, is just that: a good thriller.
I’m not going to go into Polanski’s legal problems and his current house-arrest in Switzerland. I may have my opinion on the matter, but that’s not why you’re here. I know of people who refuse to see The Ghost Writer out of protest, and I can understand that sentiment, but Polanski couldn’t make a film like this alone, and the wonderful cast makes this a film worth seeing.
The “ghost” is Ewan McGregor, a hack writer who drinks too much and researches too little. The plum assignment of all plum assignments lands in his lap when he’s asked to ghost-write the memoirs of former British PM Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), for a price he can’t turn down. Better yet, the memoirs are already written, the work of a predecessor whose untimely death created this opportunity. But as the “ghost” digs deeper into the existing manuscript, and into the circumstances around the previous writer’s passing, what he finds is far more sinister and potentially deadly than just the harmless memoirs of a world leader.
Filmed on location in Germany (meant to look like Martha’s Vineyard), The Ghost Writer is a beautifully shot and wonderfully paced thriller. This is old-school dramatic storytelling, and at age 76 and forty years on from Chinatown, Polanski proves he can still engage an audience and keep them guessing up until the end. There are nods to Hitchcock and Orson Welles in both story and style, but Polanski is also smart enough not to play this as an exercise in retro-filmmaking. The story (from writer Robert Harris), is drawn from recent events, and Polanski allows the characters to develop and move that story forward naturally. This is not a loud-noise-and-shouting political thriller, this is a much more assured, more confident film from a man who knows that the only thing that scares us more than the unknown is knowing something no one was meant to know.
McGregor gives one of his best recent performances as the “ghost,” a man whose name we never even hear. His ghost is completely anonymous and, to those around him, disposable. McGregor covers a range of emotions from confusion to anger to complete panic, but he also manages to show a wicked sense of humor as well. Brosnan also does standout work here as Adam Lang, and while it’s less manic and more controlled than his role in The Matador, it’s far more subtle and nuanced. Olivia Williams plays Ruth, Lang’s (possibly-soon-to-be-ex-) wife, and she steals many of the scenes she shares with both McGregor and Brosnan. The rest of the cast includes Tom Wilkinson, Kim Cattrall, Timothy Hutton and Jim Belushi, all of whom are perfect in every way (except maybe for Cattrall’s British accent).
Some say this film reflects Polanski’s life, with Lang forced to live in exile because of past transgressions. If that’s the case, and if Polanski is making a statement to that effect, my only wish is that this film would better reflect the messy nature of his situation. The Ghost Writer feels too clean, almost clinical at times, and as Polanski no doubt knows, nothing in life resolves itself this neatly. The ending feels as if it came first, with the writer working backwards from there, tying up all the loose ends. The result is a film that sometimes feels too set on moving from point-A to point-B, when sometimes we should move in a different direction altogether.
The Ghost Writer certainly isn’t Polanski’s best film (honestly, how can you top Chinatown?). I can say without hesitation that The Ghost Writer is getting more attention than it probably deserves based on Polanski’s personal situation. But it is a solid and entertaining thriller from a legendary director with great performances from McGregor, Brosnan, Tom Wilkinson and Olivia Williams, which makes it worth seeing regardless of how you feel about the man who made it.
