beginnings and endings
by Douglas Messerli
Robert Harris and Roman Polanski
(screenplay, after the novel by Robert Harris), Roman Polanski (director) The Ghost Writer / 2010
Just when it appeared that Roman
Polanski had disappeared from an active film career—after a five-year hiatus in
directing a full-length feature film and imprisonment in a Swiss prison for his
crimes in the USA in 1977—the noted Polish director has appeared to have
outdone Houdini, recovering his art in an elegantly complex political thriller,
The Ghost Writer, a work at once
visually stunning, excitingly scripted, and heighted by a well-crafted score
with near perfect sound.
It is hard to imagine that Polanski was forced to edit this film in
prison, but he has always battled adversity in his work, and it is apparent
that when he is cornered, he pours his life into his art.
A man (Ewan McGregor), named throughout the film only as The Ghost, has
been hired, with much resistance on his part, to replace the former Ghostwriter
to the British ex-Prime Minister, Adam Lang. Lang refers to him only as
"Man."
Although Lang's lovely home is as moderne
as they come, it might as well be a creepy Victorian mansion the way Polanski
infuses it with dark intrigue. Lang's wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) screams out
at someone upstairs, while Lang's blonde secretary (Kim Cattrall) cheerily
organizes and protects her employer while simultaneously oozing sexuality. Even
the cook and driver seem suspicious. The Ghost is permitted to read Lang's
original version of his memoir only in one room, and is unable to take any of its
pages from the house, where it is locked away in a code-protected cabinet. An
attempt to download the manuscript on his own computer sets the house afire
with warning bells. As The Ghost proclaims this haunted tomb-like domicile is
"Shangri-La in reverse"; "I'm aging."
No sooner has The Ghost met Lang and begun the arduous task of
uncovering the man's past, than the former politician is being attacked in the
press for having been involved in the torture of prisoners in the Iraqi war.
Clearly based on Tony Blair and his wife Cherie, the Langs are an odd couple to
whom Adam serves as likeable performer of Ruth's deep intellectual insights.
With the attacks in the press and television come new responsibilities
for The Ghost, as he is drafted to write a press release about the incidents,
and, soon after, told to leave his hotel. Lang, in danger of being arrested if
he returns to England (in a situation that Polanski must have devilishly
relished in the script Lang is forced to remain in the USA, while Polanski
continues to be trapped in France and other European countries) is trotted off
to meet with US officials, while The Ghost broods over the entire change of
events and particularly the increasing attentions of Ruth.
Like any good story by Hitchcock—a mentor who Polanski revealed as far
back as Rosemary's Baby—the already
deteriorating situation grows even more murky when The Ghost discovers in his
room, the former Ghost Writer's room as well, hidden photographs of Lang and
other figures taken from their Cambridge University (Blair went to Oxford)
college days, when he was involved in the theater. One date on these
photographs stands out: Lang had met his wife some years before he claims he
met her in his book. The name and address of another figure intrigues the
writer, and a telephone number scrawled across this material turns out to
belong to the man, a former aid, who has leaked the information about Lang's
war crimes.
Curious about the former Ghost Writer, The Ghost takes a bicycle trip
around the island, uncovering an old man (Eli Wallach) who reveals the body was
found too far away to have washed up from the ferry and reports that a woman
living near the beach had seen flashlights on the night of his death.
Mysteriously, she fell in her home soon after and remains in a coma.
Although The Ghost may now be haunting the Langs, he is, strangely
enough, completely innocent and therefore doomed to repeat the pattern of his
predecessor. Worried about his absence, Ruth comes to bring him home, whereupon
he tells her all that he has discovered. She, it is clear, is highly troubled
by the news, and, after a long walk in the rain, returns home to crawl into The
Ghost's bed.
Determined to leave the house and his now demanding clients, The Ghost
discovers that the car, loaned to him by the chauffeur, has been programmed to
take someone via the ferry to a house in the mainland. The house turns out to
belong to one of the figures in the pictures of Adam and his friends, Paul
Emmett (icily played by Tim Wilkinson), who poses as a professor but, in
actuality—we soon learn—works for the CIA. As The Ghost begins his return back
to the island, he is chased by a car, and it is clear that he is nearly doomed,
like the first Ghost Writer, to drown. He escapes by leaping from the ferry
just as it pulls away.
But again his innocence betrays him. He calls the mysterious telephone
number once more, and Sidney Kroll (Timothy Hutton), the man behind Lang's
downfall, answers, soon after rushing to the terminal hotel where The Ghost is
hiding out. It is now apparent, he declares, that Lang has been a CIA operator,
explaining why all Lang's political decisions have paralleled those of the US.
It is suddenly clear that The Ghost is "in the gap," caught
between both sides, even if those perimeters are not yet clear. Having now told
both Ruth Lang and Kroll everything, The Ghost has little chance to survive.
But the scriptwriters still have some tricks hidden away, as an angry
Lang, returning by airplane, picks up the straying Ghost and lectures him for
his stupidity. As they arrive back on the Vineyard, Lang is shot and killed by
a purportedly angry father of a fallen soldier, while the other figures scatter
in fear and horror. Although determined to erase himself from what remains, The
Ghost has no choice, perhaps, but to finish what he started, and the film ends
with Lang's memoir being published.
Secretly invited to a book-launching party by Lang's former secretary,
The Ghost hides in the crowd while Lang's wife champions her late husband. The
Ghost has brought the original manuscript as a present to the woman who once so
carefully locked it away each evening. After all, he muses, she had been so
attentive to it, perhaps it should belong to her. Oh, it wasn't me, she demurs.
They were afraid there might be some incriminating information in it, something
about the "beginnings."
Suddenly the truth becomes apparent in The Ghost's formerly confused
mind. Escaping to another room, The Ghost takes the first lines of the early
chapters—chapters which he edited out—piecing them together to reveal that it
was Ruth, not Lang himself, who had joined the CIA early on. Her advice to her
husband was informed by the Americans throughout Lang's life. Was this hidden
puzzle Lang's secret attempt to redeem himself or an embedded admission?
Despite all he now understands, The Ghost is still a fool, as he writes
the phrases he has discovered on a piece of paper and passes it forward through
the crowd to Ruth. She now knows that he knows. But surely it does not matter.
The Ghost was dead before the story began. And this Ghost, it is apparent,
living only in the shadows of others, was never, as Ruth taunted him, able to
do anything of his own.
As he exits the bookstore, manuscript still in hand, a car speeds
forward. In a brilliant cinematographic decision, Polanski does not show the
man being hit, but focuses the camera in the opposite direction as the pages of
the manuscript, one by one, blow down the street, ensuring that that truth will
never come to knowledge. As in Polanski's Chinatown—as
in so many of his films—evil easily wins.
Los Angeles, April 8, 2010
Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (May
2010) and Reading Films: My International
Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).
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