FILM REVIEW: 'THE GHOST WRITER'

A Straight-Up Political Thriller Achieving What Polanski Does Best

As a longtime fan of director Roman Polanski’s work — Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and The Tenant are among my favorite films of all time — I’ll see anything he does. Not at all as cautious as I might be with other filmmakers, I went into The Ghost Writer blissfully blind. I didn’t even want to know what it was about. But I suppose the cat is out of the bag now that The Ghost Writer has not only been released but won the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival.

It’s not a ghost story.

The Ghost Writer is a straight-up political thriller. Starring Ewan MacGregor as the scribe-for-hire of disgraced former British Prime Minister Adam Lang’s (Pierce Brosnan) long-awaited memoirs, the film starts with a slow burn at the wick and becomes ever more incendiary until it finally explodes into a bang-up ending…all metaphorical, of course.

While there is no supernatural or twisted element to The Ghost Writer, many of Polanski’s trademark genre flourishes abound — from the isolation of a clueless character (ala Jake Gittes), an ever-increasing suspicion of matters unknown (“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean nobody’s after you”), to global conspiracies pared down to show its effects on just one man (think: Frantic).

The movie is cast to absolute perfection. MacGregor is marvelous as the world-weary second ghost writer (the first one died under dubious circumstances before he could finish the book), and Brosnan is brilliant as the bemused, out-of-touch politician looking for new ways to reconnect with his constituents and hopefully shine up his tarnished rep in the process. Olivia Williams is stark and sexy as the Prime Minister’s long-suffering but resilient wife, and Kim Catrall pleasantly surprises as his not-so-secret mistress. Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Hutton, and Eli Wallach are all standouts in their smaller, no less significant roles.

While the visual style isn’t as ostentatious as some of Polanski’s other movies, his re-team with DP Pawel Edelman (The Pianist and Oliver Twist) is nonetheless stunning in its sparseness and covert artiness. The music (Alexandre Desplat) is quietly ominous, meshing seamlessly with the overall ambiance of this compelling, calculated thriller.

With cheeky nods to old-school Faustian mysteries like Sunset Blvd. and The Third Man, The Ghost Writer is full of nail-biting suspense, dark humor, sexual tension, and revelations hiding around every corner. Even at 2-1/2 hours, the storytelling of novelist/screenwriter Robert Harris never wanes…and the ending is classic Polanski, pitch-perfect.