Pierce Brosnan is Adam Lang, the disgraced former prime minister of Britain living in Cape Cod to keep a low profile in the face of allegations of war crimes. Ewan McGregor plays the ghost writer, never given a name in the film, who takes on the task of finishing Lang’s memoirs after his first ghost writer washed up dead on a beach. Despite knowing nothing about politics, the Ghost is lured by a big paycheck. As the Ghost delves deeper into Lang’s world, he discovers secrets that put his life at risk.
The similarities between Lang and Tony Blair is obvious, but it is his desperate attempts to preserve dignity in the face of overwhelming evidence against him that conjures up uncomfortable parallels to Polanski’s real-life troubles with the law. This is Polanski’s most overtly political work to date. While the liberal political message is not the focus of the story, there is enough of it there to turn off some of the film’s right-wing viewers. The film’s main focus is rather the fickle and twisted world of politics and the people involved in it. But it is not just politics that are corrupt. Publishing moguls exploit people to sell books and romance is nowhere to be found in this world. And our guide through this wasteland is a ghost writer, one with almost no real history or characterization. His entire life is spent telling other people’s tales so that he has none of his own, until now.
McGregor got possibly the least interesting role in the film. The Ghost is the “every man” in the story, his lack of a name representing his lack of an identity. His shocked reactions to the controversies he uncovers are meant to reflect our own, though we are of course in on the game long before the Ghost, and waiting for him to catch up can get tiresome.
Lang’s wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) has a disposition as gloomy as the reliably overcast New England weather. Williams’ portrayal of the frustrated wife of a politician is heartfelt and layered. The other woman in Lang’s wife is his chief assistant Amelia Bly, played by Kim Cattrall in a surprising turn as a platinum-blonde ice queen. She delivers her lines with a chilling calm that pierces the air whenever she’s on screen.
Polanski’s repertoire is defined by his noir suspense-thrillers. His past films, such as “Chinatown,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Death and the Maiden,” are filled with flawed characters that make up a medley of moral grays, and “The Ghost Writer” is no exception. There are no heroes in his work, just victims at the whim of powerful evil or ironic fate.
“The Ghost Writer” is rounded out by spectacular lighting schemes and a dramatic score by Alexandre Desplat that rarely ceases. The film is so overpowered by tones of blue, brown and gray that bright colors are rare, and their presence is off-putting and alarming instead of welcomed.
This darkness of this political suspense thriller is already difficult to watch, and Polanski does not make it any easier with his narrative style. It is as if he wants the audience to suffer through the process of the film with him, and so he destabilizes any character or plot point the moment it starts to feel comfortable. And none of this matter, for, in reliable Polanski-fashion, the stakes will be dramatically altered in the film’s final moments. This time around, he hit his mark perfectly.
But aside from a thrilling ending, the film is painfully overt in every plot twist or turn. It reads like a classic detective-thriller where important facts are repeated multiple times (just in case you missed it), characters explicate in detail and there is even a key witness who mysteriously ends up in a coma. A little more subtly would have gone a long way for Polanski in this otherwise well-constructed story. It is the thrill of the chase and masochist pleasure that make “The Ghost Writer” worthwhile.
See Also:
- North by Northwest, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1959
- Chinatown, dir. Roman Polanski, 1974
- The Big Sleep, dir. Howard Hawks, 1946
- The Third Man, dir. Carol Reed, 1949
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