The Ghost Writer - Review

The Ghost Writer - ****

Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer pulls you into the story in much the same way that a Scientologist pulls you in by promising a "free personality test," but in a good way. I find the trailers for it are a double-edged sword: on the one hand, they tell you about the movie. On the other hand, they tell you it's a thriller. The problem with this is that the thriller part creeps up on you. Just as you get used to the characters and the setting, events start creeping in. In fact, me telling you that sort of ruins it. Then again, people get interested in the word "thriller." What to do, what to do.

The movie stars Ewan McGregor as a writer who's been hired by a publishing company in New York to ghost write the autobiography of former British prime minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), a politician so obviously modelled after former PM Tony Blair that I'm surprised no jokes about George W. Bush were made. The writer is asked to take the job with a strict deadline of one month, but he's not starting from scratch. He's taking over for the original ghost writer who had already finished a manuscript. What happened to the original writer? He died while shadowing Lang in his Martha's Vineyard escape. Suicide or accidental drowning due to drinking, they say. He meets Lang's wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams) and Lang's assistant/secretary (I was never sure which), Amelia (Kim Cattrall), while they help him get accustomed (in different ways) to Lang and his new surroundings.

I've told you the set-up, but I'm afraid that if I go any deeper than that, I'll raise your expectations. Not in terms of quality, but in terms of plot details. It's best if you just let yourself be absorbed by the story.

The movie sets up events in such careful, detailed points that you delve deeper and deeper into this world. Polanski, with help from the book's novelist Robert Harris, has skill in his ability to edge you into the hot water like making a hard-boiled egg by starting in cold water ("hard-boiled," get it?). It's a well-made story, and I barely noticed that he uses the traditional Raymond Chandler-esque (his name is almost mandatory when talking about stories like these) devices like introducing characters one by one throughout the story, as well as following the protagonist and witnessing only things he sees. Then again, you can't not do that when you're presenting a mystery (or mysteries? oooh) to both a protagonist and the audience at the same time.

If you didn't get my "hard-boiled" joke by now, then you probably don't know who Raymond Chandler was, either.