The Ghost Writer: Memoirs Of An Invisible Man

I saw Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer at the mall tonight, and seldom has a movie so nimble played to an audience so doddering. Not that I’m any kind of agile young gazelle either, but the crowd who showed up for the film’s opening night in Edmonton was an unusually old and portly bunch. I would put the median age at around 60. And if the comments I heard from various couples within earshot of where I was sitting are any indication, The Ghost Writer may face the unusual marketing dilemma of appealing to a crowd just old enough to have big problems following it. The film was accompanied by a steady murmur of husbands consulting wives about the meaning of what they’d just seen happen, and wives asking husbands to clarify lines of dialogue. At one point, Ewan McGregor’s character does a little internet research, and the man next to me had to quiz his wife about what “Google” was.

Of course, even McGregor isn’t exactly sure what’s going on here. He’s a failed author who now makes a living as a ghost writer — he may not be a great stylist, but he’s got a certain glib cleverness that sells books, and he works fast. His latest assignment is to rescue the hopelessly dull memoirs of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan, playing a sort of matinee-idol version of Tony Blair). The project is a shambles: not only has the publisher (a surprisingly witty cameo by Jim Belushi) paid $10,000,000 for this snoozer, but the previous ghost writer has turned up dead, having apparently gotten stinking drunk and fallen off a ferry. No sooner has McGregor relocated to the PM’s compound in Martha’s Vineyard than Brosnan is accused of crimes against humanity for having extradited four suspected terrorists to the CIA to be tortured. And as the apolitical McGregor pokes around Brosnan’s house and learns more about his mysterious early years in Cambridge, he begins to wonder if he’s learning exactly the facts that his predecessor did… and is setting himself up for an equally suspicious death. (He even dresses in the dead person’s clothes… shades of Polanski in The Tenant!)

The plot is satisfyingly complex, although the ins and outs of the mystery don’t matter as much as the atmosphere of slyly accumulating dread — the hilariously desolate landscape, which recalls Polanski’s early comic suspense film Cul-de-Sac; the droll score by Alexandre Desplat (who’s just turning out one winner of a score after another these days); a wonderful turn late in the film by Tom Wilkinson as an inscrutable old CIA spook. The opening scene, in which we see every car exiting a ferry… except an empty one… is especially Hitchcockian. Indeed, it sort of recalls an opening scene Alfred Hitchcock often said he wanted to film, in which he’d show a car being assembled, step by step, in an automotive plant — the twist being that when the car was finished, the workers would discover a body inside. Here, we get a car but no body, but it’s still pretty eerie. People are also talking a lot, and rightly so, about the final shot, which has Hitchcock’s visual economy as well as his dark, sardonic sense of humour.

I wonder what uses Hitchcock would have found for Pierce Brosnan and his not-entirely-trustworthy good looks. I can imagine him playing the Ray Milland role in Dial M for Murder, for instance — Brosnan has this sinister undercurrent to his screen presence that has prevented him from playing conventional romantic leads… he always seems to be contemplating killing his wife. Olivia Williams, who plays Brosnan’s wife in The Ghost Writer, is not blonde or perverse enough to be a Hitchcock type, but she projects an unusual combination of ruthlessness and vulnerability that in all her scenes makes her consistently the most fascinating person onscreen. McGregor is in every scene, but he paradoxically has the least fleshed-out character — which is by design, of course, as the title indicates. But he finds fun notes to play throughout, as in the moment where, confronted by enormous temptation, he looks at himself in the bathroom mirror, tells his reflection, “Bad idea!” and then promptly walks out and does the bad thing anyway. One wonders if Polanski has had similar conversations with his conscience over the years.

Given his current legal difficulties, The Ghost Writer may well be the last film Roman Polanski ever gets to make. It’s not a masterpiece, or any kind of thematic career-capper, but it’s good to see him going out on a solid, well-engineered, grown-up entertainment that any director could be proud of. And I’ll mention it again: he certainly leaves on a terrific final image… even if the seniors sitting around me seemed unsure what it meant.