Polanski serves up some tense suspense with The Ghost Writer

By Brian Reinhart     3/11/10 6:00pm

The first scene of The Ghost Writer feels like something from a Hitchcock movie: A passenger goes missing from the ferry to Martha's Vineyard, and his body is found washed up on the beach. In scenes to come, the movie will allude to modern politics and rely on a car's GPS system for a valuable clue, but The Ghost Writer is still an homage to Hitchcock's mode of storytelling. This is an old-fashioned suspense movie updated for a new century. Ewan McGregor (Angels and Demons) stars as a professional ghost writer whose name is never mentioned. The writer is assigned to pen the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Die Another Day's Pierce Brosnan). The last ghost writer to try to write Lang's life story-well, his body is the one that washed up on the beach.

Maybe the death was just an accident. But there are strange coincidences to explain, Lang is surrounded by intrigue and his staffers are downright creepy. McGregor's character begins to look for answers, but the deeper he digs, the more lives are put in danger.

The Ghost Writer begins at a slow pace. Its opening scenes are all about creating the atmosphere of Martha's Vineyard, where the mystery takes place. Fog rolls in off the heavy waves of the Atlantic Ocean, and the ominous horns of passing ships underscore especially tense moments. The more the ghost writer learns about the conspiracy he has unearthed, the more heavily rain pours down.

---

---

As visually arresting as these opening scenes are, and as masterfully as director Roman Polanski (The Pianist) sets the stage for the action to come, the opening half hour of the movie goes by pretty slowly. It takes twenty minutes for Prime Minister Lang to appear, and many of the opening scenes are necessary to establish the plot but not particularly interesting.

But invest a little patience in the film and it will provide significant returns. The Ghost Writer is not an action movie, it is a suspense movie. By the end, the suspense it creates will become almost unbearable.

Even the slow opening scenes are entertaining, as the new ghost writer arrives at a creepy hotel where he is the only guest, has an encounter with Lang's security system and receives key evidence from a creepy old man living in a roadside shack. All three scenes are clear homages to the suspense movies of Hitchcock.

As the plot thickens, the pace increases, too, and the movie's enigmatic characters give us more and more to think about. What are Lang's motivations? Why is his former foreign secretary, Richard Rycart(Robert Pugh, "Doctor Who"), trying to get Lang prosecuted for war crimes? And just what is going on in the mind of Lang's troubled wife, Ruth (An Education's Olivia Williams)?

I should mention that Lang is very obviously modeled on a real ex-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair, and that the war crimes for which Lang is tried in The Ghost Writer are based on crimes of which critics accuse Blair. Politics are so important to the movie that the actress playing the American Secretary of State is a Condoleezza Rice look-alike.

Director Roman Polanski's own personal drama also appears in the film. After the war crimes charges arise, Prime Minister Lang faces the fact that he cannot return to England without being arrested. One thinks of the fact that Polanski himself avoided prosecution by American courts in the same way until he was finally arrested during production of The Ghost Writer.

Luckily, it is possible to set aside the political and personal baggage and enjoy The Ghost Writer as a thriller. Brosnan is fantastic as Lang, alternating between a slick political charmer and an angry victim of his opponents, and Williams provides depth and suspicious hostility to her role as Lang's wife. McGregor plays the ghost writer very well, as a man who would rather not be dragged into a conspiracy but feels obliged to find the truth.

The important thing to remember, as director Polanski takes his time in creating the movie's mood and making every character suspicious, is that the action really does pick up at the conclusion. The Ghost Writer spends a lot of time setting up and then delivers, with three stupendous climaxes in the last ten minutes. The first one is a total surprise and the second one is pulse-poundingly intense, but the third climax, arriving in the movie's very last frame, is the most stunning of all.

It's so stunning, in fact, that you may never know what hit you.

---