Adapted from Robert Harris’ novel ‘The Ghost’, Roman Polanski’s brooding mystery/drama/thriller ‘The Ghost Writer’ (2010) succeeds for a number of reasons. The Ghost (brilliantly played by Ewan McGregor) is assigned to write the memoirs of ex-British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), who finds himself the subject of war crime allegations as soon as the Ghost arrives, but some time after his own political tenure. With each edit and revision of Lang’s writings, however, the Ghost sights dark parallels between the memoir’s subject and the CIA and begins to doubt – and theorise about – how the writer he replaced died in the first place. Polanski produces a dark, but beautifully shot film about politics, deception and estrangement, all of which takes place on the backdrop of a cold, but breathtaking seaside landscape set in Massachusetts.
McGregor is excellent as the Ghost: aloof, misanthropic and uninspired. He numbly trudges through pages and pages of Lang’s work, mildly inspired by what he sees. He sleeps, in a similarly disinterested and detached way, with Lang’s melancholic wife Ruth (well played by Olivia Williams), who is left visibly unhinged by the allegations brought against her husband. McGregor’s performance, whilst brilliant and the focus of the narrative, is unmatched by other performances in Polanski’s picture. Kim Cattrall as Amelia Bly, for instance, is pathetic in her role as cold assistant to Lang. Her accent waivers between English, American and, I could have sworn at one point, Australian. In summary: Cattrall’s performance is poor, the symptom of an obvious casting slip-up. Tom Wilkinson as Paul Emmett, in contrast, is quite intriguing and contends with McGregor’s laconic anti-hero. Wilkinson delivers his pretentious Yale and Cambridge alumnus role with complexity and darkness, features that also stand out strongly in the film’s overall mise en scene too. Brosnan as Lang is also great; suave but burdened by his political past. Polanski, quite obviously, displaces his own anxieties about border travel into Brosnan’s character. When Lang realises, with legal advice, that the US is the best place for him to reside, considering he is about to face war crime charges, Polanski’s use of irony is striking. He himself has been at war with US border security since being convicted of rape there in the late 1970s. By Lang being able to travel freely to the US, is Polanski suggesting a reluctant return to the US? The answer remains debatable. Nevertheless, supporting performances from Timothy Hutton, Jim Belushi, Robert Pugh, Jon Bernthal, Tim Preece and the visibly frail, but brilliant Eli Wallach all burst with intensity, much like the narrative’s Hitchcockian suspense and chilling visuality.
Polanski gives us just over two hours of quality thriller cinema. The film is thematically rich and visually stunning, a sign that the director, despite ongoing personal turmoil, can still work well at his own art form.
(4/5)
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