Review: The Ghost Writer

Ewan McGregor is a London author dispatched to America to take over ghost writing duties on the memoir of former British PM Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), after the original ghost writer met an untimely end. The book’s publishers (a bald Jim Belushi among them) hoping to make megabucks and Lang’s reps have different ideas of what they want out of the book, thus making McGregor’s task more difficult. Lang is currently being slung with mud by a former colleague (Robert Pugh) of war crimes and is basically holed up in a Martha’s Vineyard retreat. Whilst staying at the retreat, McGregor also gets to meet Lang’s long-suffering wife Ruth (Olivia Williams), who knows her husband is having it off with his personal assistant (Kim Cattrall). He also begins to uncover some secrets that, although making for a juicy story, might not be to everyone’s liking and might have him end with a similar fate to his predecessor. Tom Wilkinson plays an academic from Lang’s past, and Eli Wallach plays an elderly local McGregor meets, who might have some vital information for him.

This 2010 mystery/thriller from co-writer/director Roman Polanski (“Repulsion”, “Rosemary’s Baby”, “Chinatown”) comes highly-touted, but I must say that I never quite got it, to be honest. Supposedly author and co-screenwriter Robert Harris (“Fatherland”, “Enigma”) wrote the Adam Lang character as a thinly-veiled version of former British PM Tony Blair. Unfortunately, the film, and the Lang character, screamed ‘American’ to me, except that the locations used were obviously not American. I mean, this is Roman Polanski we’re talking about. He’s not stupid enough to set foot in the US (Or the UK for that matter). But seriously, I saw a lot more JFK and Bill Clinton in the Adam Lang character, and at no point did Brosnan’s rather intimidating, philandering portrayal of Lang remind me in the slightest of what (admittedly little) I know of Tony Blair, who always came off more like a Hugh Grant-type to me (Grant, according to IMDb apparently turned the role down), or at least Michael Sheen. Brosnan’s Lang is, quite frankly, an incommunicative prick at times. Perhaps Blair is behind closed doors, but he always came off as relatively affable, if a bit of a butt-kisser. Thus, a lot of the supposed ‘fun’ of the film failed to work for me at all. I know Blair obviously had connections to the US during the Bush years (supporting the Iraq war) and Polanski is probably interested in that, but I think he goes too far to the point of even connecting him to Halliburton (called something different here, of course, but so close to it that it’s obvious). What the hell? Bush, sure, but Blair? It’s almost like, instead of dealing with Blair’s role in things factually, Blair has taken Bush’s place, except still being a former British PM. I’m a lefty, but that’s too much of a stretch, even for me. Perhaps in an effort to not stick too close to the facts, Polanski (or perhaps Harris, I’ve not read his novel) has made the real-life ties all too confusing, at least for someone like me who isn’t a Blair expert in the slightest. Perhaps I’m wrong (I haven’t kept up on my conspiracy theories on the subject, I must confess), and Blair archivists will tell me how accurate this all is, but I can only tell you what I think, and I never bought it. I mean, why would a British PM keep calling another Brit ‘man’ all the time? That’s just absurd. Eli Wallach delivers a line, however, about a guy in the White House, that does seem to confirm that the film is meant to be about Blair. To further complicate things, Tom Wilkinson plays an American who studied at Cambridge, and Lang is also meant to be a former actor, like Ronald Reagan. I don’t seem to recall Tony Blair having a thespian past. There’s probably even more US parallels that I didn’t spot. Hell, most of the damn film is set in the US, despite its largely British characters. Perhaps if it weren’t meant to be a Blair story, and well-known to be one, I might’ve accepted the film a little more. Meanwhile, the only scandalous thing in the whole film is brought about by a Google search on the CIA. I’m pretty sure the CIA are a bit stingy about giving out information, so I’m not sure how fruitful it would be to look up CIA stuff on Google.

Even if Polanski did get his facts right on Blair, the film still wouldn’t quite work for me. It’s not a bad film at all, but it’s not terribly Polanski-like. I kept waiting for a truly nasty underbelly to be exposed or a film-altering twist, but nothing especially significant comes along. Anyone could’ve directed this film, except that most other filmmakers likely would’ve gotten to the point. I’m not even sure what Polanski’s point was. Unfortunately, there’s just no tension or excitement to the story, no matter how hard Polanski tries, because the story unravels so damn slowly, and is somewhat ‘been there, done that’. Polanski attempts a similar conspiratorial vibe to what he achieved in “Rosemary’s Baby” involving telephone calls, and it does work, but that’s a small achievement when the rest of the time he doesn’t succeed nearly as well in maintaining interest or tension. Also, the ending flat-out sucks. I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have, but if you’re gonna have a revelatory note passed out, how’s about showing it to the audience too, Roman? No, of course not, we can’t do that, can we?

I did like some aspects to the film, especially the performances. I may have my reservations about the character he plays, but Pierce Brosnan is well-cast in his role as written. He’s not in the film as much as I would’ve liked, but the man doesn’t get enough credit for his acting skills usually, and he’s really good here. His impenetrability and egotistic vibe (almost Clooney or Burt Lancaster-esque) make him a nice match for Ewan McGregor’s rather naive, bland, nice guy. McGregor is equally well-cast in this respect and easy to sympathise with. A scene-stealing Olivia Williams and never-better Kim Cattrall are also memorable and both interestingly cast (in ways that only really reveal themselves towards the end). Williams, who doesn’t for a moment give off a Cherie Blair-vibe to me (at least not exclusively), seems to get better with every role. Here she at first seems to be playing a similar role to the one she played in “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll” of all things, but it slowly reveals itself to be an altogether different character. At any rate, she walks off with the whole movie as the kind of woman you’d want to marry and stay married to only because if you dared betray her she’d likely seek revenge on you. And yet, for all her flaws, she’s the one character more than perhaps anyone else who I actually had sympathy for at some stage in the film. Kim Cattrall, as I’ve said, has never been better, and credit where it’s due, she not only looks good for her age, but she seems to be playing close to that age too. She was always the best thing on the overrated “Sex and the City”, but even then she became tiresome and easy to imitate. She affects a slight British accent here, which isn’t as awful as you’ve probably been led to believe (Jim Belushi mockingly attempts one at one point, and is hopefully deliberately awful), and her performance is genuinely solid. There’s an excellent cameo by the great Eli Wallach, too, one of the all-time best character actors. I must also make mention of the snooty, arty interiors of Lang’s Martha’s Vineyard beach house (really the North Sea, which make for an hilarious contrast to the rather quaint, countryside/beach exteriors. I’m not sure how much of that was intentional, given Polanski’s travel restrictions, though. The music score by Alexandre Desplat is incredibly distracting, alternating between a whimsically sinister Danny Elfman-lite to something more Bernard Herrmann-lite. It’s so inferior that it constantly calls attention to itself and helps take you out of the experience.

This film is overall watchable, but for me, I found it a rather jarring, slow-moving, and ultimately disappointing experience. Hardly among Polanski’s most memorable works.

Rating: C+