The Ghost Writer

In Roman Polanski's The Tenant a man moves to the apartment of a woman who recently committed suicide there. Strange things occur in the building and the new tenant slowly assumes the identity of the dead woman. It's a disturbing situation that Polanski takes to its logical conclusion.
I mention this as a way of introducing The Ghost Writer because here again Polanski takes up the idea of the average man who, because of the circumstances surrounding him, slips out of his identity to sink into someone else's. Polanski hadn't made a psychological thriller in ten years, since The Ninth Gate. It's a pleasure to see the master hasn't lost his craft.
Ewan McGregor plays a ghost writer assigned to help the ex-prime-minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) finish his much-anticipated memoirs. The ghost, as he jokingly calls himself, takes the job under ominous circumstances: his predecessor had recently washed up on a beach, dead from either a drinking accident or suicide. It seems like a sign. But $250,000 are enough to temporarily quell the ghost's doubts.
The ghost travels from London to the USA, where Lang has taken residence on a remote island to finish the memoirs. There he meets his wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams) and his hospitable secretary (Kim Cattrall). Ruth seems to be the brains of the relationship and Lang a pretty down-to-earth guy with little interest in politics. The writing goes well, with the ghost looking for the emotions in Lang's past, the things ordinary people will want to read about, and Lang being pretty open about it.
But suddenly Lang becomes the centre of an investigation regarding war crimes; accusations arise that he may have assisted in the kidnapping and torturing of innocent people in the war on terrorism. Lang's life becomes a media spectacle. And to make matters worse, the ghost starts finding discrepancies in the details of Lang's past, details that his dead predecessor had also discovered and was investigating. Using the clues left by him, the ghost slowly unravels a vast conspiracy.
The Ghost Writer seems to have come out of the '70s. I say this as a compliment to that magical decade of filmmaking whose thrillers have set the modern standards and have seldom been surpassed. There is little physical action in the movie but a lot of intellectual activity going on. It seems to relish in finding and interpreting clues, in following intuition, in seeing all the pieces of a puzzle slowly but neatly fit together. In one of my favourite sequences, the ghost takes his predecessor's car to go back to his motel. But the car's GPS is on and its locked coordinates urge him to go in the opposite direction. The ghost, partly following his gut, partly wanting to shut up the annoying GPS, follows the coordinates, travels by ferry to the mainland and arrives at the doorstep of a man who ends up having a central role in the conspiracy.
The movie doesn't just entertain with a mysterious, suspenseful story (the screenplay was written by Polanski and Robert Harris, the novel's author); it's a perfect example of filmmaking. The ghost brings with him the foul British weather: there's little sunshine in the movie; cinematographer Pawel Edelman, with whom Polanski worked in The Pianist, suffuses the movie with nebulous tones, giving it a sense of hostility and melancholy. Alexander Desplat's score, by opposition, shouldn't work as well as it does, with its light-heartedness and exuberance. But its dreamy, fast-paced tunes end up accentuating the ghost's feelings of mistrust and anxiety.
It's in this impressive atmosphere that the actors give very fine performances. Ewan McGregor, whom I've never loved, grabbed all my attention as the innocent nobody (he doesn't even have a name in the movie) who gets involved in something way over his head. Olivia Williams' self-restraint in her performance can only be fully appreciated by the end of the movie, when it's revealed to be an essential part of her character's personality. And Pierce Brosnan is pretty at ease in his role of a disgraced ex-prime minister, eliciting sympathy while being something of a jerk at the same time.
The Ghost Writer is not terribly ambitious. It isn't here to reinvent the thriller. Polanski knows what works and knows how to make it work, and he shows precision and effortlessness at creating suspense, telling a story and bringing all the aspects of filmmaking together. Roman Polanski's return to the genre that made him famous around the world is above all an opportunity for the 76-year-old director to just have some fun doing what he loves most. The viewer is more than welcome in joining the fun.