In Theaters: The Ghost Writer
After being moved into the Lang compound and confronted with evidence of both Lang's dishonesty and his predecessor's suspicious death, The Ghost begins nosing around. In an ingenious bit of technological business involving a pre-programmed GPS system, he is led to the linchpin (played as the ultimate old boy by Tom Wilkinson) of what looks to be a massive, multinational conspiracy tying the British government to the bullying interests of its warmongering enfant terrible. The latent threat of danger is finally manifest; carried along by Alexandre Desplat's tremulous, propulsive score, Polanski moves into classic, paranoiac pursuit mode for an immensely satisfying low-speed chase.
Polanski has fun with some Brit-out-of-water bricolage and doesn't miss many opportunities to tweak the noses of a bio-hunting viewership. But despite its torn-from-the-headlines pretense (and the allusions to torture and weapons trade don't figure as much more) he is uninterested in either political or personal statements. It's a lighter affair, concerned more with plot moves and performance. Fans of McGregor, who gives a shiftless twist to the wide-eyed conduit he patented in Moulin Rouge, will be in Highland Heaven. Williams is also fantastic as the petulant, pragmatic ex-first lady who holds herself as an adult among squalling children, and Brosnan fairly shimmers with post-power satiation.
One of the film's most notable ironies is the foregrounding of the writer as everybody's towel boy in a film which such obvious fidelity to its source, a novel by Robert Harris. (The nameless Ghost is subjected to a mordantly perfunctory seduction; he is not even invited to the book's eventual launch.) "The novel is the screenplay," Polanski told Harris (they collaborated on the script), and indeed it is the pop lit contortions, particularly the handling of the penultimate scene's revelation, that tart up an elegantly appointed piece of genre work. Thankfully the final word, as it were, is pure Polanski, an image of shocking darkness and startling beauty as uncanny and elliptic as its creator.
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Comments
I was excited about this film until I realized there wouldn't be any appearances by a low budget flying graphic which needed alphabet magnets to communicate.
I think I'm the only one on the planet who wanted to love this movie but was horribly disappointed. The script is just awful.
I agree. It had its moments but overall it was pretty predictable, and I had a hard time trying to figure out Kim Cattrall's accent.
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