The Ghost Writer a Bit too Transparent

The Ghost Writer

Directed by Roman Polanski
RP Films, 2010, 128 mins.
PG-13
* * *

The Ghost Writer is the latest directorial effort of controversial director Roman Polanski. Though much of it is supposedly set on Martha’s Vineyard, the bulk of production work took place in Germany because—as any tabloid reader knows—Polanski has been in self-imposed exile since 1977; he was on the lamb from a U.S. warrant for statutory rape until his arrest in September of 2009.

The Ghost Writer could have benefited from a dose or two of controversy. It’s a well-acted and compelling thriller, but not one that can withstand much scrutiny. The film grafts a thriller to standard film noir tropes, beginning with a classic too-good-to-be-true setup. A struggling British writer (Ewan McGregor) is offered a cool quarter of a million dollars for one month’s work; all he has to do is fly to the United States and help former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) whip his memoirs into something readable. The money overcomes the inherent creepiness of taking over from another ghost writer who fell from a ferry and drowned. As always happens in such films, things go wrong from the get-go. Our hapless protagonist endures a grueling trip to an offshore island, where Lang paces like a caged animal in an ultramodern compound that’s filled with cool gadgets but feels like a prison. Secrecy and security are more than protocol—they’re obsessions­—and the air is filled with frosty exchanges between Lang, his wife Ruth (Olivia Williams), and Lang’s personal secretary Amelia Bly (Kim Cattrall), whom Ruth openly implies is sleeping with her husband. To top it off, the ghost has been on the job for less than 72 hours before Adam Lang becomes the target of a major human rights investigation by The Hague for having illegally turned over of terror suspects to a CIA torture team. As things spin more and more out of control the ghost writer turns private investigator, begins to suspect that his predecessor was murdered, and traces the trail to a retired American professor Paul Emmett (Tom Wilkinson) who might be a high-level CIA operative.

As noted, the acting is first rate. McGregor walks a fine line between cynicism, charm, and paranoia, while Brosnan plays former Prime Minister Adam Lang with appropriate dashes of egotism, attraction, and smarm. Olivia Williams is superb as Ruth; we know that she’s the brains behind Adam, but she never tips the hand revealing why she endures such an empty suit. Cattrall surprises as Bly and pulls off a subtle physical duality in which she’s at once sultry, but with frumpiness looming on the horizon. As for the underrated Tom Wilkinson—his American accent is so good and he plays Emmett with such aloof condescension that you’ll have to remind yourself he’s neither a Yank nor a pampered superstar prof.

The film’s major weaknesses lie in unimaginative filmmaking. Though the plotline is based on a work of fiction, there’s little doubt that Polanski took an autobiographical approach to the subject and cast surrogate selves in the roles of men being hounded and pursued. As such, the film is often heavy handed with scenes in which Polanski strikes with a gauntlet when a small glove slap would do. Polanski still knows his way around the camera and there are some stunning shots, but the film’s look is ultimately less an homage to film noir than a grab bag of its clichéd elements: crashing waves, thunder claps at tense moments, anxiety-enhancing fog, Hopperesque landscapes, lighthouse beacons presaging revelations…. Polanski’s hackneyed overuse of such tired symbols draws attention to continuity errors, such as how the island can be utterly barren at one moment and teeming with protestors the next.

A final problem: Although I agree that the CIA causes global mayhem, I’m tired of films in which the agency is cast as the omnipotent cloak-and-dagger power behind every throne. Such beliefs may play well among Europe’s paranoiacs, but those who live in the United States might counter that the word “intelligence” in CIA is a misnomer. Its real track record—as opposed to its imagined role—suggests that the CIA tacks toward the incompetent end of the intelligence spectrum. The CIA can’t locate Osama bin Laden, for instance. Hell, it took American intelligence thirty-two years to put the collar on an internationally known filmmaker who has been hiding out at press conferences across the globe!