The Ghost Writer (2010)
Directed by Roman Polanski
A writer stumbles upon a long-hidden secret when he agrees to help former British Prime Minister Adam Lang complete his memoirs on a remote island after the politician's assistant drowns in a mysterious accident.
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Interrogating a retired academic ( Tom Wilkinson , superb) reminiscent of Hitchcock 's tweedy professors in " The 39 Steps " and " North by Northwest ," McGregor's every attempt to unravel a decades-old political plot is checkmated by the kind of politesse that's hardened by an impenetrable, unflappable sense of self.
Still, it's a pleasure to see Ewan McGregor act again after a series of misfires ("The Men Who Star at Goats," "Amelia") and although the film's locations are suspect, the overall production, capped by an Alexander Desplat score that recalls "North by Northwest," has Hitchcockian pleasures.
It's a set-up reminiscent of Hitchcock, say, in North by Northwest.
The Ghost Writer starts with an ominous scene on a ferry at night—one that recalls the moment in Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932) where cars in traffic have to go around a car that is at a stand-still because its driver has been murdered.
The closest parallel in Polanski's past movies is to "Chinatown," another mystery about a little guy who finds solving the crime easier than challenging powerful interests.
Unlike Polanski's troubling, sordid and passionate Chinatown, The Ghost Writer is more elegant exercise than inspiration.
Here, as in the cruel ending of " Chinatown ," a character may die off-screen, out of frame, but traffic -- the motion that fools us into believing we are headed somewhere -- rolls on.
That’s the juicy question buried in the depths of Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer,” an extraordinarily precise and well-made political thriller—the best thing Polanski has done since the seventies, when he brought out the incomparable “Chinatown” and the very fine “Tess.”
Survival in a wolfish world has been the career-long theme of the sardonic director of Knife in the Water , Rosemary�s Baby and Chinatown, and people sniff for parallels between the auteur�s personal traumas and foibles and those of his characters.
While many will point to “Chinatown” as Polanski’s masterpiece, I found this was to be as intriguing and interesting to watch.
Interrogating a retired academic ( Tom Wilkinson , superb) reminiscent of Hitchcock 's tweedy professors in " The 39 Steps " and " North by Northwest ," McGregor's every attempt to unravel a decades-old political plot is checkmated by the kind of politesse that's hardened by an impenetrable, unflappable sense of self.
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"The Ghost Writer" is more specifically meant to evoke a combination of Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard" and a Cold War-era John le Carré political spellbinder.
The movie’s most inspired choice — one that solves a plotting problem in the “Sunset Boulevard”-inspired structure — is the film’s final moment, a scene that wasn’t in the script but “ad libbed” late in production.
Its isolated setting is reminiscent of Cul-de-Sac (1966)—a fact that offers some hint to the shape of the story the film finally pieces together.
Polanski co-wrote the strangely unsettling screenplay with Gérard Brach, with whom he subsequently collaborated on Cul-de-sac (66).
Its emphasis on a central setting is cinematic and atmospheric, rather than the theatrical pressure-cooker rationale of Death and the Maiden; indeed, the new film harkens back to that other island movie, Cul-de-sac (in contention with Chinatown as the director’s masterpiece).
Indeed, there are hauntings aplenty in this sleek, masterful thriller that recalls such classics as "All the President's Men" and the more recent "Michael Clayton" in its pared-down, paranoid style.
This may not be on quite on the level of that political intrigue benchmark All The President's Men, but it has a certain charm and style to it that shows Polanski's film-making skills can't even be contained by house arrest.
There is a sequence in the Hitchcock classic Foreign Correspondent when Joel McCrea and his comrades, in a car pursuing another car bearing a man who just carried out a very public assassination in the city they’ve left behind, round a curve and see … an empty road and miles of windmills (it’s Holland).
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The director of “Repulsion,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” and “Macbeth” long ago put away his knives.
Although “The Ghost Writer” is more traditional in its storytelling than his early masterpieces like “Rosemary’s Baby” or”Knife in the Water,” the man hasn’t lost any of his ability to keep an audience on the edge of its seat.
Once acclaimed as one of Hollywood’s finest directors for “The Pianist,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown,” Roman Polanski is a Holocaust survivor whose first wife, Sharon Tate, and their unborn child were brutally murdered by Charles Manson’s clan.
Once again, Polanski is exploring the dangers underneath the smiling surfaces of civil life, the way he did a generation ago in "The Tenant" (1976), "Chinatown" (1974) and "Rosemary's Baby" (1968).
And it's important to remember that Polanski's earlier films -- much like Fritz Lang's during his Hollywood period -- were mostly dime-store thrillers of a similar nature ( Knife in the Water , Repulsion , Rosemary's Baby , The Tenant , etc.); it's just that time has turned them into classics.
That way lies the madness of " Repulsion " and " The Tenant ."
Once again, Polanski is exploring the dangers underneath the smiling surfaces of civil life, the way he did a generation ago in "The Tenant" (1976), "Chinatown" (1974) and "Rosemary's Baby" (1968).
And it's important to remember that Polanski's earlier films -- much like Fritz Lang's during his Hollywood period -- were mostly dime-store thrillers of a similar nature ( Knife in the Water , Repulsion , Rosemary's Baby , The Tenant , etc.); it's just that time has turned them into classics.
The film’s overriding theme of the loss of personal identity—or of your identity being swallowed up by that of another—is straight out of The Tenant (1976).
Sure, he sullied it along the way, be it with admissions of statutory rape, or movies like Pirates, but when you carry a canon that contains the likes of Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and The Tenant, we can forgive a few Bitter Moons along the way.