In Roman Polanski’s latest film, The Ghost Writer, Ewan McGregor plays a character who has no name. He is on a island, working on the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister and gets drawn into a double intrigue: the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his predecessor, another ghost writer who disappeared off a ferry and washed up on the shore the island, and an political scandal involving his boss, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), who is accused of sponsoring torture during his term as prime minister. The film contains a cocktail of typical Polanski themes: a tightening sense of paranoia and claustrophobia, an innocent main character whose curiosity and sense of justice drags him over his head into a criminal plot, and a Kafkaesque maze of facts that serve to question the nature – or even the possibility of truth. And yet for Polanski, the film feels rather conventional – a well-constructed mystery that fascinates while in the theater, but doesn’t stick after you’ve left.
McGregor is a disgruntled ghost writer, and he only takes the job with Adam Lang because it promises to be short and pay well. Soon after arriving on the island off the coast of Cape Cod where Lang lives in semi-exile, the ghost writer discovers why he has been offered so much money. Lang’s life contains many mysteries, and the writer is caught between understanding and concealing them: Why did Lang get into politics? How did he rise so fast? What are his connections with a power military contractor? The situation turns into a media circus when Lang is indicted by the international criminal court for allegations of torture of suspected terrorists while Lang was Prime Minster. The ghost writer tries to stay out of it, but begins to discover clues left by his predecessor. Lang may have dubious connections to the C.I.A., and McGregor’s character suspects that the other writer was killed to hide these facts.
The situation escalates into a game of cat and mouse, in which the ghost writers plays both. He chases down suspects, and then is pursued by tinted windowed cars. He tries to unravel the role of Lang’s wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams – Rushmore, An Education) and the two engage in both an intimate relationship and a psychological power play. The connections to recent political history – Tony Blair, torture, corporate influence in government – are obvious and deliberate, and they help to keep the political backdrop of the story fresh and relevant (one wonders, however, how this will affect the shelf life of the DVD). But it also seems to confuse the films intentions: is this a political statement, a critique of the scales of justice? Given the Polanski back story – his sordid relationship with justice – it is hard not to read into what is going on here. In the end, however, The Ghost Writer is a rather entertaining mystery piece buoyed with a fair amount of Hitchcockian suspense, but Polanski doesn’t penetrate as deeply into the psychology of his characters – into the dark spot on the soul – as he has in the past.
