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The Ghost Writer
It’s an odd coincidence that The Ghost Writer follows so close on the heels of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island. Both are by noted directors, both are based on fairly pulpy novels (a Robert Harris best-seller in the case of The Ghost Writer), and both feel like directors returning to the simple pleasures of genre pictures. But where Scorsese marks every frame of Shutter Island with his auteurist stamp (which in this case means heavily referencing the films and filmmakers he loves), The Ghost Writer has Polanski happy to let the genre, in this case the paranoid political thriller, call the shots. One might easily credit this as a Robert Harris film, since it has the superficial pleasures of his novels.
From the elegant opening sequence, in which an empty car on a ferry unloading at the dock signals foul play, Polanski takes us into elegant-thriller territory with a heavy assist from Alexandre Desplat’s Bernard Herrmann–esque score, which gives the string section a serious workout with its long, sinuous melody line.
The missing driver, we learn in an economically short shot, has washed up on the beach. That creates a job opening on the staff of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Brosnan, trying not to belabor the point that his character is clearly based on Tony Blair). Lang has drafted his memoirs, and the dead man was ghostwriting for Lang. McGregor’s unnamed character (an affectation retained from the novel) is hired for a rush job tightening up Lang’s ramblings on a very short deadline. He’s whisked off to an island that’s clearly meant to be Martha’s Vineyard, but that is equally clearly filmed elsewhere (Germany, where Polanski didn’t have to worry about, you know, being arrested).
He’s taken to a beachside house with a brutal architecture mixing weathered shingles with concrete and hard horizontal lines (kudos to the location scout), which Polanksi and cinematographer Pawel Edelman (who also shot Polanski’s The Pianist and Oliver Twist) take advantage of in their widescreen compositions, all gorgeously lit in a way that suggests Architectural Digest, in a good way.
Our hero knows nothing of politics, but he gets a crash course when, within hours of his arrival, reports come in that Lang is going to be indicted by the International Court in the Hague for war crimes; it seems Lang helped kidnap some suspected terrorists as a favor to the Americans. Of course, McGregor starts poking around, and the further he digs, the more it looks as if there’s something very, very bad going on in the Lang household.
All the genre elements are there, from the va-va-voom but bitter Mrs. Lang (Williams) to the secret cache of evidence on which McGregor conveniently stumbles. There’s even a sinister academic, played with relish by Wilkinson with his very best moneyed menace. By the end, we’ve been treated to a lot of hokum that barely passes the smell test (pursuit by mysterious cars, characters with obvious hidden agendas, and a secret message left in a ridiculous fashion), but Polanski and his cast seem fully, almost winkingly aware of how silly the material is. This isn’t Polanski the artist trying to make a profound statement (ahem, The Pianist); this is Polanski the thriller guy, the one who made Frantic and Bitter Moon and The Ninth Gate. Nothing wrong with that.
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