The Ghost Writer (2010)

Director: Roman Polanski                              Writers: Robert Harris & Roman Polanski
Film Score: Alexandre Desplat                       Cinematography: Pawel Edelman
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Tom Wilkinson

The Ghost Writer began as a novel by the British author Robert Harris, who has written some very nice World War II related suspense novels like Fatherland and Enigma. The film has a distinctly European look to it, even when it supposedly moves to the United States. Normally this is something I like very much, and it’s obviously due to the fact that director Roman Polanski still can’t return to the United States and filmed the entire project in Europe. Unfortunately, the film has a very claustrophobic feel. The primary setting is an unnamed island somewhere on the eastern coast of the United States, and most of the time there is spent in a luxurious, though sparse and cold, house on the beach.

The film begins with a ferry unloading onto the island and a car in the front row that doesn’t have an owner. Eventually we see a body washed up on the shore of the island and we only learn later that it is the ghost writer for the former prime minister of England, Pierce Brosnan, who is living in exile on the U.S. island. With the ghost writer dead, Ewan McGregor’s agent gets him an interview with the publishing company in London and they offer him the job, on the contingency that he finishes in four weeks. When he arrives at Brosnan’s compound he finds the prime minister enigmatic, recalcitrant, and distracted. When allegations come out that he gave approval for terrorist suspects to be water-boarded, suddenly the publishers want the manuscript in two weeks. But Brosanan heads to Washington, leaving McGregor on the island and, he soon abandons the book in order to figure out who killed the previous ghost writer.

Harris’s story unfolds incredibly slowly, perhaps more than any of the films made from his novels, and without any real idea of what’s going on an hour and a half into the film it tends to drag. And it’s not as if there are a surfeit of suspects, either. In this case, literally no one could have done it. Motives are completely absent from the proceedings leaving the audience as clueless as McGregor as to what is going on. Eventually the answer comes, but by then it is little more than a disappointment. There is intrigue aplenty, but all of it going on behind the scenes and while the final reveal had the potential to be satisfying, I have the feeling that Polanski sabotaged it, for it’s vastly different than the ending of the book.

I can’t say that this is a good film because there is absolutely nothing suspenseful about it. McGregor is something of a poor man’s Kenneth Branaugh, younger but without the twinkle in his eye. Brosnan’s performance seems phoned in, as do practically all of his performances. He’s trying so damn hard to not be typecast that he has wound up typecasting himself and in the process has become an incredibly uninteresting actor. The supporting cast is about the only thing in the film that is good. Kim Cattrall goes back to her English roots to put on a British accent as Brosnan’s secretary, and Olivia Williams is tremendous as Brosnan’s wife. Tom Wilkinson has a brief turn as one of Brosnan’s fellow college students, and Robert Pugh is fantastic in a small roll as a former minister, while Eli Walach has a small cameo as an island resident. But even that isn’t enough to save the film. By the time the final reveal comes, the whole exercise seems corny. In the end, The Ghost Writer is little more than a rather tedious mystery.