The new Roman Polanksi film will give some segments of the movie-going public pause.
How should we embrace “The Ghost Writer,” a film by a confessed child rapist currently in the news for a decades old crime for which he refuses punishment?
More importantly, what about viewers who don’t see a moral equivalency between terrorism and the potentially inhumane treatment of terrorists to save lives?
“The Ghost Writer” flashes some of the skill Polanski commands like few of his peers. It’s a joy to be in the company of a filmmaker who doesn’t resort to quick cuts, shaky cameras or other negligible tricks to gin up interest.
But the story being told isn’t equal to his chops, making his latest effort more of a resume extender than satisfying thriller.
“Writer” stars Ewan McGregor as a freelance writer hired to polish the autobiography of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan).
Seems the previous ghost writer either committed suicide or drowned – nobody seems to know, or care, for sure. But the task in front of the new Ghost – McGregor’s character never gets a name of his own – is simply making something readable out of Lang’s bloated prose.
The stakes spike when Lang is charged with war crimes for sending terrorist suspects over to the CIA where they were tortured for information – and one died during the process.
Right away “The Ghost Writer” seems like a relic, a case of Hollywood fighting old battles. But the war crimes subplot isn’t the only potentially troubling issue here.
The film simply isn’t tightly crafted enough to supercede its flaws, from a useless romantic subplot to a lead character we can’t fully embrace. Polanski uses news clips to help nudge the narrative along, a lazy trope beneath an artist of his calibre.
And it’s embarrassing to watch Eli Wallach appear solely as an expository device.
The respected character actor deserves far better.
Much worse for the movie’s sake is that the Ghost’s moral compass is never made clear. Is he aghast at Lang’s activities? What are his views on the war on terror? Just who is he, anyway?
McGregor shows flashes of wit and charisma, but he can’t define a role that exists as an axis to spin the film’s conspiracies around. And in some instance the Ghost lets Polanski hammer home political points.
Lang is clearly Tony Blair, and the film asks audiences to see a man who pushed too far in the fight against Islamo-terrorism as a first-class villain. But, ultimately, it’s not his fault. Blame America.
“Why did he get himself mixed up with that guy in the White House?” a character asks the Ghost at one point, to which the writer replies, “That’s what everyone wants to know.”
To the ideologically inflexible, there aren’t two sides to the Iraq War story.
The 76 year old auteur can still flex his cinematic muscles, from the assured camera work to the fine performances all around. Brosnan injects Lang with an arrogance that’s immediately recognizable from a former leader.
The thriller wraps with a howler of a sequence that seems better suited to cap a Scooby Doo mystery.
“Zoinks!”
“The Ghost Writer” is hardly one of Polanki’s best, and if the wheels of justice finally grind into action it’ll serve as an unfortunate swan song to an occasionally brilliant career.
(Photo: Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams and Pierce Brosnan star in “The Ghost Writer”/Photo: Guy Ferrandis -© 2009 Summit Entertainment, LLC. All rights reserved.)
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Good grief, another dump on America movie? Considering the horrors visitied upon Polanski’s family during the Holocaust, you’d think he’d be a little more sensitive to the threat Islamofascism poses to the world.
You’ve separate blogs here – whether we should distinguish artists’ lives from their work is a topic of its own (our own Woody Allen immediately comes to mind, but a recent Seinfeld concert had me musing on the topic before).
I do side with the mild surprise that Shoah survivor Polanski would helm a story with a “Blame America!” subtext, but if WWTW correctly predicts this as his pre-imprisonment swan song, perhaps the message is deliberate….
D.
When I read about this I just kept thinking about how hurtful it must be to Blair and Bush to know that Roman Polanski finds them to be immoral.
could you please review the movie and not let you opinion of the man get in the way
Polobear – actually, that’s precisely what I did. But when the director of a film is in the news constantly for a horrific crime it seems odd not to mention that.
I would like to thank you for your brave review. You are a voice crying in the wilderness. It seems every critic that has “reviewed” this film is either smoking something terrible for their critical synapsis’s’s’s or they have such a colossus case of cinematic blue balls that they would dry hump the cinema seats just to watch Polanski’s house arrest videos shot on his Iphone. The budget for this film seemed comparable, that’s for sure.
This movie was a major disappointment. And your review nails it.
But of all the crime’s to my wallet… I can’t believe I just saw Kim Cattrall in a Roman Polanski film. I guess he was really impressed with all her work on Trapper John, M.D. and her profound skills in Porky’s, and Sex in the City and that Star Trek movie. Because her British accent was spot on. I mean, it was probably the best British accent I’ve ever heard. Almost as good as her Vulcan. Polanski has lost it. The End.