“The Ghost Writer” offers return to vintage Polanski

"The Ghost Writer" is an incredibly refreshing change of pace from most political thrillers that have been churned out by Hollywood lately, which are often thin and forgettable at best, and hackneyed and polemical at worst. "The Ghost Writer" is neither, thanks to the pedigree of its director and co-screenwriter, Roman Polanski.

The film is distinctly and magnificently Polanskian in the way that it constantly makes the viewer feel uneasy, as if everything in the film's world is just slightly off-kilter and no one can be trusted.  "Hitchcockian" is the word that many are applying to the film's style and structure. While that's true to some extent (its use of political scandal as a kind of MacGuffin), the film's humor, mood, and themes are vintage Polanski all the way.

Based on the novel "The Ghost" by novelist and former BBC journalist Robert Harris (who receives co-credit for the screenplay as well), the film's plot is—like the book—slightly analogous to the political career of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and the "Blair" character's name is Adam Lang, played by Pierce Brosnan.

The film opens with a shot of a mysteriously empty car sitting in the middle of a ferryboat's garage, followed by a shot of a dead body lying on the beach, being washed over by the waves. We can intuit that the empty car belonged to the dead man, but it isn't until later that we learn who the dead man is and why his body washed up on the beach.

From that opening scene Polanski causes us to squirm in our seats, and he forces the viewer to begin asking questions from the get-go. We can clearly see that something is just wrong, but we don't know why. It's eventually made clear that the dead body is Mike McAra, who was working as a ghostwriter for Prime Minister Lang's memoirs at the time of his mysterious death.  A new writer, played by Ewan McGregor, is assigned to finish ghosting Lang's memoirs by adding to the material that was already written. McGregor's character, who goes unnamed but is called "the Ghost" in the credits, is a washed up alcoholic whose personal life feels as empty and as meaningless as his line of work.

The night before the writer is scheduled to fly out to Lang's vacation home in Martha's Vineyard, news breaks that a former member of Lang's cabinet has publicly linked him to instances of torture and kidnapping in connection with the CIA. The Ghost arrives at the gray, rain-swept house in Massachusetts and is greeted by Lang's mistress/secretary, played by Kim Catrall, and Lang's seemingly long-suffering wife, played by Olivia Williams, whose motives and machinations are a mystery to the Ghost. From there, the Ghost begins his task, but when he begins rifling through the manuscript left by his predecessor, he finds that there are some things that don't add up—disturbing mismatches that imply secrecy and corruption as being deeply woven into Lang's political career. 

If I'm making the film sound utterly trite and conventional, I assure you that it's not. It is Polanski's most Polanskian film since, perhaps, "Bitter Moon."  Polanski realizes that reliance on plot is utterly boring, and that mood and characters are what largely shape an exemplary thriller such as this.

The acting is splendid, with Pierce Brosnan turning in another fine post-Bond performance as Lang, a man who has coasted by on a pretty face and the shrewdness of his associates. Tom Wilkinson has a brief, but unforgettable scene as a strangely sinister academic whose ties to Lang are not apparent at first, but his delivery of the much-quoted line, "A less equable man than I would start to find your questions impertinent," tells us all that we need to know. Olivia Williams is the other standout as a woman who always knows more than she lets on, and remains two steps ahead of the people around her.

The final shot has been referred to as a punch line, although some people might not appreciate the joke.  It helps to remember that when it comes to humor, Polanski doesn't play nice.