|
Directed by Roman Polanski |
The Ghost Writer The
first scene in Roman Polanski’s new film
“The Ghost Writer” has four men sitting around a
publisher’s office as they offer the writer (Ewan McGregor) the job of
ghosting the memoirs of Adam Lang, a former Labour
Prime Minister of England – you can think Tony Blair – by
offering him $250,000 for four weeks’ work. What was odd to me about that scene is
how badly Polanski directed it.
His choreography was elementary, and It seemed that his actors had
little idea of how the scene held together; each one was intent on making an
impression on us instead of serving the director’s purpose. My impression was that Polanski,
who’s been in Europe for thirty years, had lost some of his familiarity
with the English language and couldn’t tell where the beats and pauses
would be likely to come. It was a bad start for what was to be a suspense
film. From
there, though, Polanski tightens up his atmospherics and suspense, and yet
the story (from the novel “The Ghost” by Robert Harris), set in
the aftermath of George Bush’s
invasion of Iraq, never quite has enough to it to smother us in its arms and
turn us, willy nilly,
from one side to another, as Polanski used to do. The film has been compared to
Hitchcock, but Hitchcock would have added something to it to make sure we had
witnessed some terrible moment and would keep that in our bellies till the
film ended. Pierce
Brosnan is the Tony Blair character, Olivia
Williams is his wife Ruth, and the house they’ve rented for the winter
on Martha’s Vinyard is spooky enough (the
film was shot on the Baltic coast of Germany, since Polanski cannot come to
the United States). Rain falls
almost constantly, the skies are grey, we never see the sun, and Ewan
McGregor is the innocent who’s thrust into all this. No sooner has he sat down to interview
Adam than news is broadcast that Adam is wanted as a war criminal for, among
other things, capturing suspected Al Queda fighters
and surreptitiously sending them to the CIA for torture and death. While we’d think that that would
make Adam even more interesting, what it does is take the suspense out of the
film; we already know that Tony Blair did this, that it was a criminal act by
any standards, so the only question now would be will he get away with it? It’s not enough to hang a suspense
film on, and “The Ghost Writer” doesn’t ever overcome that
flaw. |