Movies |
The Ghost Writer
Roman Polanski (director)
By
Published: Jul 09, 2023
Category:
Drama
This week’s weather forecast is for heat and more heat. Butler’s mission is thus to entertain you — to suggest movies and music that will provide more refreshment than the latest streamer and the sign-up numbers in Zuckerberg’s Musk-killer.
But Roman Polanski? Is anyone more canceled? His most recent film, “An Officer and a Spy,” was a major hit in France. It was nominated for a dozen French Oscars and won two, including two for Polanski: Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. It will never be shown here. Watch the trailer. Console yourself with the excellent novel that inspired the movie.
I’m not whitewashing Polanski. A zillion years ago, he took a 13-year-old-girl to Jack Nicholson’s house in Los Angeles, drugged her and committed several varieties of sexual crimes. He was arrested. Pled guilty. Fled the country. And, decades later, completed the editing of “The Ghost Writer” while in a Swiss jail.
Bad people sometimes make good art; Polanski directed “Chinatown,” on many lifetime Top 10 lists, mine included. My praise here is specific: “The Ghost Writer” won six European Film Awards, including best movie, director, actor and screenplay. [To rent the video stream from Amazon Prime, click here.]
The movie has a cheery topicality: corruption at the highest levels of the British government. Intrigue. Maybe even murder. It’s pure fiction — but fiction with a point. With a punch. Delivered with great verve by, excuse me, one of the planet’s best directors.
Adapted from a novel by Robert Harris, it’s the story of a writer who’s never named. That’s appropriate; his skill is writing the memoirs of celebrities. He’s fast. And good: The last book he ghosted — the memoirs of a magician: “He Came, He Sawed, He Conquered” — raced to the top of the best-seller list. Now he’s called in to complete the memoirs of Adam Lang, former British Prime Minister. The previous ghost? Drowned. He has just a month to turn the manuscript in. Watch his meeting with the publisher.
He’s hired. Watch the trailer.
He starts reporting. Or is he investigating? Unwise. Watch.
Who’s who in the cast? The former Prime Minister, played by Pierce Brosnan, is a stand-in for Tony Blair. His attractive, chilly wife is a version of Cherie Blair. And the fresh trouble Adam Lang is in — allegations that he helped the CIA kidnap four Pakistani terrorists, the sort of thing that The Hague might consider a war crime — isn’t unbelievable, at least in England, where many citizens are quite certain that Blair was a “lapdog” for George Bush.
For the ghostwriter, these charges couldn’t come at a worse time. Lang is angry and distracted; instead of working on the book, he races down to Washington for a photo op with the American Secretary of State, a woman who just happens to be African-American. Slowly, painfully, the ghost begins to make connections between Lang’s new problems and McAra’s death. And the tension mounts…
If you are seeing parallels between “The Ghost Writer” and Polanski’s own situation — a man accused of terrible crimes, living in exile, trying to clear his name — give yourself ten easy points. If you see a connection to “Chinatown” — a less than professional detective, way over his head, stumbles into a conspiracy so corrupt he’s unprepared even to recognize it — give yourself ten more. (Extra-point question: The Asian man sweeping the decks at Lang’s beach house — what’s his equivalent in “Chinatown”?)
The filmmaking is confident, organic, efficient at the highest level. And a lot more than clever talk.
Polanski was 77 when he made this film. The director who made “Chinatown” and “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Pianist” still had his A-game. In an interview, Pierce Brosnan expresses his admiration:
The lens was never far from his hand. I sat on the back of the camera one day…His viewfinder was burnished with time, the numbers were worn away and they were all penciled in on bits of gaffer tape…He’d be setting the camera up and having a private conversation with himself. You’d be going for the take and he’d be, ‘No, no, stop, no,’ and then, ‘Give me the camera, I want the camera, the fucking camera.’ He could freak some people out. But that was his passion.
As filmmaking, “The Ghost Writer” is fun and provocative. And adult. It reminds us that a thrilling film can be made in a living room, that a sharp conversation can be as deadly as a bullet, that music and cinematography don’t have to assault the ear or poke you in the eye to be thrilling. How old-fashioned. How refreshing.
