The Ghost Writer
Let me start at the ending. The last shot of Roman Polanski’s new thriller is one of the finest I’ve seen. The timing is perfect. The atmosphere it evokes is powerful. And the music by Alexandre Desplat (who is becoming a perennial Oscar nominee for good reason) is dramatic, and filled with unsettling feeling.
Now let’s talk about the rest of the film. Yes, Robert Harris’ story, adapted by the author and Polanski, is hardly subtle in the parallels it makes to for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Bush administrations corruption, but that’s what makes this film such a juicy thriller to watch.
Ewan McGregor plays an author brought in to be the ghost writer of former PM Adam Lang’s memoirs. The previous one died under rather suspicious conditions, and left behind a manuscript that needed shaping. But McGregor’s writer finds himself in pretty deep from the moment he lands on the Massachusetts island where Lang (Pierce Brosnan) is holed up with his wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) and an entourage led by his perky assistant (Kim Cattrell, very good in a very un-Samantha role).
Polanski is a master storyteller with unforgivable personal choices to live down. But he’s still managed to create entire universes for each of his stories, be it the underrated “Ninth Gate” or the Oscar-winning “Pianist,” and “Ghost Writer” is no different. We feel the unease of McGregor’s character, and his anxiety when things start to get, well, odd (like when a car follows him after he meets with a Harvard professor (the superb Tom Wilkinson)). And as the story unfolds, leading up to a
gripping revelation spelled out in the manuscript at the heart of the story, Polanski takes us in directions we never expected to go, with performers whose very personalities inform our emotional connections with the characters. That makes his final shot work all the more as we see the truth blowing in the wind.
