Movie Review: Ghost Writer

LITTLE ROCK — Unsettling and occasionally ridiculous, The Ghost Writer is an enjoyable transposing of a Robert Harris pulp political thriller to the screen that is elevated by director Roman Polanski’s trademark tone of vague and nagging menace. Though never as grandiose (or as unsubtle) as Martin Scorsese’s similarly discomfiting Shutter Island, The Ghost Writer finds an undertone of terror in the otherwise mundane feeling of being left out of the loop.

Like Shutter Island, most of the action takes place on a Martha’sVineyardish island off the coast of Massachusetts - though for reasons you may have heard about it wasn’t filmed there. The fugitive Polanski shot the film in Germany on a coupleof remarkably austere islands in the North and Baltic seas as well as in Berlin (which doubles for London). And, just as in Shutter Island, a man with a shaky grasp on his identity is summoned to the island.

In this case it’s a rootless young writer (Ewan McGregor) who is given the apparently plum assignment of typing up the memoirs of a former British prime minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), who’s living in self-imposed exile. The job came open when Lang’sprevious “ghost” apparently fell off the ferry crossing to the island while drinking.

McGregor’s writer is so negligible a presence that none of the other characters ever address him by name; Lang greets him with a collegial “How’s it going, man?” while neither the great man’s long-suffering wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) or hardcharging assistant Amelia Bly (Kim Cattrall) perceive him as anything other than hired help. But the new ghost proves himself valuable to the team when, on the day after he arrives, he drafts a vanilla statement responding to the breaking news that Lang is accused of war crimes.

It’s not long before the apolitical ghost is drawn into a web of intrigue as he tries to tease a coherent narrative out of the unprofessional manuscript left behind. Polanski is so good at sustaining suspense that even as we begin to see around the sides of this wonderfully paced, expertly executed paranoia play we can glimpse Polanski’s genuinely dark view, a hard sad kernel of pessimism for the chances of the virtuous nameless against the entrenched brand names of power.

MovieStyle, Pages 37 on 03/19/2010

Print Headline: SHADOW OF FEAR