Even as Roman Polanski seemed destined to stand trial, finally, for having champagne-&-Quaalude-leavened sex with a 13-year-old 30 years ago, he was polishing up his 18th feature, The Ghost Writer, about a famous man who cannot leave his house for fear of being extradited. Polanski's sense of isolation and bitterness seeps throughout the new film, for better or for worse, and you cannot be blamed for wondering if a Polanski biopic is inevitable (starring Simon McBurney!), preferably directed by the man himself. The intrigue!
The Ghost Writer is about politics, not sex, and it has a refreshingly literate, thinking-man's vibe to it that shouldn't be underestimated -- it is, after all, a thriller about what to do with a very badly written book. Professional ghostwriter Ewan MacGregor is hired by Mr. Clean-headed publishing bulldog Jim Belushi to rewrite ex-Brit Prime Minister Pierce Brosnan's memoirs, after the first ghost turns up drowned in the Cape Cod surf near where the PM and his security-crazed team are holed up. We're obviously dealing with a version of Tony Blair here, complete with stupid showbiz past, habitual public grinning, photos taken with a Condie Rice simulacrum, and, oops, charges of torture and war crimes from The Hague, which heightens the pressure in the compound considerably.
But for MacGregor's everyman, things are suspicious and odd from the gitgo: If his predecessor's death doesn't give him the creeps, the drunken, idiotic English accent of Kim Cattrall, as Brosnan's secretary, certainly should have. (Honestly, there's no accounting for why Cattrall is in the movie, surrounded as she is by real Brits, all of whom can act.)
There's no missing Polanski's hand -- few working filmmakers know how to maximize and accumulate pungent, uncomfortable details like Polanski. Here, he's toying with us in his trademarked way that makes beautiful sense: Since nearly everything MacGregor's hero runs into is questionable and/or confidential in a political sense, Polanski's shady, sneaky visual approach feels sublimely organic. (He should have always been making political films, especially in the Nixon era.) He can turn the simplest action into undistilled anxiety -- a protracted car chase through country roads and onto and then off a ferry is executed practically without a word (except for MacGregor's GPS, which is a clue trail all its own), and slowly at that. But there's no chance to be bored, because Polanski knows where you should be looking, and not a frame is wasted.
So what's The Ghost Writer really about? That's where things get somewhat fishy. MacGregor helplessly investigates the hanging herrings he finds, files and photos and conflicting dates and Tom Wilkinson as a Harvard prof with a decidedly shady side, but the conspiracy he uncovers in Brosnan's past isn't a monstrous fantastical one but one all too realistic -- so realistic it's barely a conspiracy at all, but merely guilt by association. With all of Polanski's crafty goosebumps, we were led to expect something other than politics as usual, weren't we? Maybe it's a film intended for the politically naive, for whom the equations the film makes will seem like shocking fiction. For the rest of us, it scans a little like old news.