The Ghost Writer (Polanski, 2010)

The Ghost Writer (Polanski, 2010) - *1/2

SPOILER ALERT

                Well-shot, well-acted, well-edited, well-designed, well-directed – all it needed was a story that wasn’t a pointless mish-mash of microwaved 70s conspiracism and ripped-from-the-headlines liberal porn. Sadly, that’s all The Ghost Writer ends up being able to offer, tossing away good talent after bad screenwriting, reinforcing what I call the Travolta-Kidman corollary – there is no correlation between talent and taste.

                Adam Lang (an A+ effort from a fundamentally miscast Pierce Brosnan) is this ever-so-slightly-parallel universe’s Tony Blair, a beleaguered former British PM, a once-charismatic renewal figure hounded out of office for being an American lapdog, is now holed up on his tiny island modernist mansion slaving through his memoirs while the ICC works its way towards charging him for participating in rendition. His ghostwriter, tragically, drowns, so its up to Our Hero, apolitical professional ghostwriter (Obi-Wan McGregor) to fix Lang’s crappy books while negotiating his spurned wife (Olivia Williams, great in a terrible role), assistant/mistress (Kim Cattrall), the anti-Lang protestors, the media, and etc etc. Strange things happen, real-life parallels pop-up (the Condi look-alike!), dastardly conspiracies are uncovered (Tom Wilkinson!), you can probably write the rest yourself (and it might have been a better flick).

                The Ghost Writer fundamentally reveals itself during a key late-film twist involving an assassination. It’s one of the few things the film leaves at least the slightest bit ambiguous (and the scene is shot brilliantly by Polanski), but the implications get at the heart of what the film is about, dredging up The Parallax View, Capricorn One, and their cohort to drive its point home with a sledgehammer. Those films were (to varying degrees) great in large part because they captured the zeitgeist of an era; The Ghost Writer tries to graft today’s events onto yesterday’s zeitgeist to get an inert object of only technical interest. The world is a more complicated place, and we know too much; the blindingly simple and obvious conspiracy posited by the film (and the face-palmingly faux-cynical forced ending) is more laughable than anything else. Finish by assuming a wisecrack about the real ghost writer this film needed.

(Seen at the Shepherdstown Opera House)