Review

Review Date: 7-March-10
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

The Ghost Writer (2010)

The Ghost Writer exemplifies how a so-so story can become a good movie when all the other elements fall into place. Applying an ideal cast and menacing atmosphere to conspiracy-theory potshots at the powers that be, Roman Polanski delivers a thriller that is taut and engaging despite a paucity of action.

The spot-on casting begins with Ewan McGregor, Hollywood's go-to guy for ingenuous but not emasculated male roles. As the unnamed title character, he accepts the whirlwind assignment of completing the memoirs of a retired British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan, whose looks suit the slippery politico). The PM's previous ghost writer washed up on a New England beach, a lamented suicide, which makes the replacement's position as outsider particularly uncomfortable. Still, he gamely relocates to the rainy island where the PM is holed up in a bunker/villa with his brash wife (Olivia Williams), an attractive personal assistant (Kim Cattrall), and a contingent of servants and bodyguards. The ghost's subsequent discoveries about the personal and political goings-on in the bunker suffice to distract a viewer from the horrors of its exposed interior concrete. (How can any architect or homeowner find that stylish?)

In the PM's wife Williams finds the perfect outlet for her dark-edged sexiness. She initially appears in a romantic light as the inspiration and foundation behind her husband's success, but as the plot thickens she assumes more human dimensions. These emerge as she grieves over her husband's extramarital affair and sudden downfall following the accusation that he condoned the torture of suspected terrorists. With no journalistic inclinations but acting on a fateful urge, the ghost follows clues linking this accusation to his predecessor's death. In one charged scene he swaps open queries for veiled threats with an Ivy League professor who has ties to the CIA (Tom Wilkinson, a welcomed addition to any cast). This instance and others convey the persistent sense that the ghost will never comprehend the mechanism whose workings he has glimpsed. He is small and clumsy compared with the forces that make the world go 'round; indeed, these forces are so intricate that even the PM might not grasp their magnitude.

The precipitous conclusion of The Ghost Writer fingers the culprits and then lets them off the hook, but it could not easily end with the British or American government being seriously taken to task. The forces that make the real world go 'round render such an idea almost ludicrous. Yet the film's depiction of an average man's unexpected fumbling for truth expresses the hope that everyone might question the West's power structure despite the murkiness of the task. I suppose if international deviousness were to be exposed and condemned, some little person sneaking in the back door might have the ghost of a chance.

Copyright © 2010 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.