A Film in Need of a Ghost Writer

I recently watched director Roman Polanski's latest film, the thriller The Ghost Writer. It stars Ewan McGregor as a writer hired to polish an autobiography by a former British Prime Minister, played by Pierce Brosnan. Also in the cast are Kim Cattrall, Timothy Hutton, Tom Wilkinson, and the quite talented Olivia Williams (who the geeks will recognize from Dollhouse, and some others might remember from An Education).

The movie is meant to evoke a "ripped from the headlines" quality, though it doesn't so much follow any one given true story as it lifts liberally from all sorts of recent events. The Prime Minister in question is criticized as giving into the whims of a military-minded American President; a very Halliburton-esque company plays into the film's conspiracy plot; and so on. Frankly, I found this melange to be rather muddy most of the time, and far too predictable the rest of the time. Plot was not the strong suit of this movie.

No, that would be the directing for one. Because while the script rather slavishly moves through various tropes of the genre, the movie does manage to inject some life into them. There's a moderately suspenseful sequence that is somehow built around following a GPS system to an unknown location. A "being followed by a strange car" sequence manages to avoid invoking the feel of any particular one of the countless earlier movies in which you've seen such a thing. Polanski knows how best to service the material.

The actors inject more life into it still. Ewan McGregor is a likable lead. Again, the script is a bit of a letdown, saddling him with a writer-as-detective character that doesn't really seem all that smart, but he makes a number of scenes work that would have flopped without him. Pierce Brosnan's character almost amounts to an extended cameo, but even in just a few scenes, he does a great job of showing the public and private faces of a politician. And Olivia Williams, as his wife, gives perhaps the best performance of all in the film.

Ultimately, I wish the group of people had been assembled in service of a better script. Despite their efforts, the movie sometimes bogs down in slow pacing and only intermittently entertains. I'd rate it a C+ overall. If you like your thrillers "bookish," then this might be for you.