Depending on how his current legal dramas unfold, The Ghost Writer may very well prove to be infamous director Roman Polanski’s final film. Fair or not, that probably puts added pressure on the picture to deliver. Polanski has lacked a universally acclaimed film since The Pianist, and before that he had a string of underwhelming efforts as well. The Ghost Writer, while a solid enough suspense film, isn’t the big career capper that’s going to allow Polanski to go out at the top of his art.
The film tells the story of an unnamed ghostwriter, played by Ewan McGregor, who has been hired to clean up the manuscripts of a disgraced former British Prime Minister. You see, the previous ghostwriter has been found drowned, and the film’s bleak, rain soaked landscapes and dark, foreboding score tell me that it probably wasn’t an accident.
So McGregor’s character heads off the said Prime Minister’s compound on Martha Vineyard, where he is placed through rigorous security screening and works with a manuscript that must remain locked up and secured at all times. Here he encounters a cast of mysterious, side glancing characters who all seem to have their own secrets and agendas if we were to scratch just a bit under the surface. Included among them, of course, is the Prime Minister himself, Adam Lang, as played by a Cheshire grinned, slick haired Pierce Brosnan, his stone faced but sexy assistant Amelia, played by Kim Cattrall, and his reserved yet visibly perturbed wife Ruth, played by Olivia Williams.
During the very beginning stages of McGregor’s work a big hullabaloo is made on the cable news channels accusing Lang of CIA conspired war crimes of a secret, torturey nature. This sends the compound crew into scramble mode, and before McGregor can so much as get his bearings and decide who can be trusted and who can’t, he is thrust headlong into the damage control efforts. From this point forth he is swept up in a cyclone of clue findings, late night trysts, car chases, secret phone calls, and everything else that you might imagine comes standard with a politically drenched suspense thriller.
And I say standard thriller very pointedly. Despite the technical proficiency with which Polanski crafts all of his films, it didn’t feel to me like The Ghost Writer had much more to offer. Sure, Polanski knows what he’s doing. He is able to deftly create tension in the narrative through old fashioned film making techniques, establishing mood, controlling pacing, inserting appropriate musical cues, etc. He is never forced to rely on things like jump scares or big gun battles to get a thrill out of his audience, and surely that is to be commended. In our ADD influenced, adrenaline pumped era of film making much of the basics of crafting successful genre work has fallen by the wayside and been replaced by easy short cuts. Polanski not only doesn’t fall into this trap, but he makes what he does look easy. Perhaps that’s part of the problem, here he seems to make things look too easy. No risks are taken, the film never strives to be anything more than of its genre. The Ghost Writer is so slick, so polished, so casual with the way that it unfolds it’s mystery plot that the film eventually begins to look like borderline parody. Sure it feels like a Hitchcock film, it looks like a Hitchcock film, sure it’s Alexander Desplat score sounds like a Hitchcock score; but Hitchcock’s films are so well regarded not only because they were capably crafted, but also because they didn’t resemble anything that came before them. In the decades since films like Dial M for Murder and Rear Window we have been bombarded by an endless barrage of lookalikes, and it’s no longer adequate to just make a thriller that looks like it could be up to Hitchcock’s level, you have to offer something more.
When the main character is left alone on a stormy night with the Prime Minister’s wife, we know what’s going to happen, when he goes out into the woods following his predecessors footsteps, we know he is going to run afoul of the same murderers. In one key scene McGregor interviews an old man (played charmingly by Eli Wallach) who absurdly goes off monologuing a mouthful of pertinent clues with so little provocation that what seems to be reaching for Hitchcock ends up playing closer to Scooby-Doo. Factor in the casting of cheesy genre staple Cattrall and a questionable cameo by a past his prime (prime?) Jim Belushi and I begin to wonder if there is some sort of message or statement about genre film making being projected here. Is The Ghost Writer’s message that back in the day even schlocky B movie tropes were presented with a slick aesthetic and technical credibility that today’s tent pole Blockbuster wannabes lack? Is The Ghost Writer playing on nostalgia to cement its appeal with critics and audiences? These questions I can’t quite answer myself, but I pose them in an attempt at adding a little depth to the experience of what played to me like a completely shallow film going experience.
It might be said that an attempt was made at depth when it came to the development of the main character. Ewan McGregor’s character is unnamed. A ghost. He lacks personality or agenda. Pair this early portrayal with the fact that the title of the film itself seems to reference it, and it might appear that Polanski, or at least the story’s original writer Robert Harris, might be making some sort of statement about blank slates. The Ghost starts off lacking direction, political motivation, or really any sense of identity altogether. Over the course of this mystery he becomes increasingly active in determining his own fate, seeking out clues, questioning suspects, dabbling in questions of national security. A very visible transformation is made in his demeanor, and that’s all very well and good, but why? What is the movie telling us about McGregor’s transformation? What are we supposed to feel about it? In the end The Ghost Writer doesn’t seem to have much of an opinion as it spends it’s final minutes wrapping up plot threads and solving mysteries rather than allowing McGregor to ruminate on his experiences. I would say that the blank slate nature of The Ghost seems to be more a storytelling device than a statement. He is an easy set of eyes for the audience to look through while they get bombarded with liberal politics and murder mystery clichés, allowing the screenwriters to tell a story without having to worry about something as tiresome as actually fleshing out a three dimensional character that we might care about.
That’s not to say that there’s nothing to like in the film. Polanski reteamed with Pawel Edelman, his cinematographer on The Pianist, and the results are as beautiful to look at as you might imagine. Everything from the set design, to the weather, to the costuming is grey in this film, but enough texture and interesting perspective is always added to the image to keep the visual experience of watching the film from being as drab an experience as being a character living in this world must be. The score, while derivative, is fun and effective, giving you the feel of settling in on the couch with a bowl of popcorn in the middle of the night and enjoying memories from Hollywood’s past. The performances range from effective to engaging, with special notice given to Olivia William’s portrayal of Ruth Lang. The character might have coming off as being shrewd and unlikeable in the hands of a lesser actress, but Williams imbues her with enough intelligence and vulnerability that we never stop caring about her or what place she might have in the shady goings on of the film’s dealings.
I’m sure a lot has been said about not only the Adam Lang character’s resemblance to real life British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but also to the character’s similar situation to Polanski’s. Both men have been disgraced on an international scale due to past misdeeds, both are secluded overseas in lavish compounds in order to avoid going to trial. In the film everyone who works with Lang is constantly confronted with the yells of protestors asking questions like, “Do you know that you’re working for a murderer?!” One can imagine that similar situations have happened to members of Polanski’s film crews; “Do you know that you’re working for a pervert?!” It raises interesting questions about the man and his career. Are the people who continue to work with him endorsing his crimes? Are all of us who buy tickets to his movies accomplices? Are we affording him the lavish lifestyle and worldwide credibility necessary to continue to evade the reaches of the American judicial system? These are important questions that I hope people ask themselves as they watch Polanski’s works. Are the films he makes important enough pieces of art that they need to exist despite their dubious origins? Should we judge them alone, apart from their creator and as their own thing? As long as his films continue to be as mediocre as The Ghost Writer, I imagine these questions are going to start popping up a lot more and becoming a lot easier to answer for film fans. You’re on notice Roman, if you get out of this mess and start making more films they better be closer to Chinatown than they are The Ninth Gate, or we may just throw you in jail anyways.
