The Ghost Writer
The Ghost

Ever since the release of his masterpiece Chinatown (1974) director Roman Polanski has returned to make a stylish, entertaining, quasi-detective thriller every ten years or so. Unfortunately, the quality of these films has been on a steep decline. 1988’s Frantic was terrific, 1999’s The Ninth Gate was pretty silly. 2010’s The Ghost (or The Ghost Writer outside the UK and Ireland) starts out promising enough but breaks down as it goes along rather than building to an exciting and even profound climax like the great Polanski movies do.

Ewan McGregor stars as an unnamed mid-level writer hired by a publishing firm to complete the autobiography of a former British Prime Minister, whose aide had been tasked with writing the memoir but then died in an apparent drowning accident of their home on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. Pierce Brosnan plays the former PM, Adam Lang, who bears a striking resemblance to Tony Blair but a little less bright and a little more potentially guilty of actual war crimes. When the ghostwriter travels to the Vineyard on an impossibly short timetable to write the book, he meets Lang’s powerful wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) and his personal assistant, Amelia Bly (Kim Cattrall). The previous draft of the manuscript is kept under lock and key for security reasons. The ghostwriter’s attempt to discover what his predecessor may have written into the memoir, and how it may have lead to his death, drive the narrative.

The picture has most of the ingredients for an enjoyable political thriller—a distinctive protagonist in over his head, mysterious characters between whom he must try to find connections, timely issues, an original setting, a few cameos from great actors along the way—but the movie never takes off. By the time McGregor’s writer starts to figure things out, we’ve lost interest. Everything escalates to a major reveal at the end that doesn’t come as a big surprise or a development of much significance.

The film is also plagued by a subtle but unmistakable artificiality. Nothing we see on screen feels authentic—ranging from Kim Cattrall’s British accent (passable but… wrong) to the obvious matting-in of the beach backgrounds seen out of every bay window or sliding glass door in the principal location of Lang’s island home. We know Polanski didn’t actually shoot the film in Martha's Vineyard, since the long-exiled director would have been arrested on his decades-old charge of child rape if he’d set foot in Massachusetts. But, while the exteriors (probably shot somewhere in France) do a perfectly adequate job of standing in for the Island, the frequent interior shots featuring characters standing in front of large windows all look like actors in front of green screens. Even to the untrained eye, these shots just look fake. And as McGregor begins to explore the external environment, we wonder if there are any inhabitants on this Island beyond the individual actors and small handful of extras that the filmmakers have placed in the shots.

The ersatz nature of so much of the way The Ghost looks and plays make it hard for the viewer to suspend disbelief enough to stay with the story as it develops—a critical flaw in any mystery movie. The film also seems disinterested in the politics it touches on for anything other than a framework, which is not a winning formula for a political thriller.