"Ghost Writer" (2010) Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams
Ed Augusts
Pierce Brosnan that I didn't like, to me "Dante's Peak" works
deliciously with Brosnan's character riding down lava flows to the sea
of love, and his high-end art theft flick a few years ago was superb.
But "Ghost Writer" fails on some level with me. It's not the acting,
it's not the direction. I think what bothers me is that the film goes
after a stale human rights premise with a cinematic rain machine.
Rain machine? Yes! Because the last time I saw rain like this in a
movie, it was "The Rains Came", and half of India was washed away. Or
maybe it was "Hurricane", set in the South Seas.
Ewan McGregor gets 100% of the on-camera time in this flick.
Unfortunately, he plays a sneaky little ghostwriter who, if he just
quietly did the job he won, stood to make a cool quarter million just
making tiny changes to an existing manuscript. But no, he's got to
screw-around in more ways than one, and deliver goods to his
employer's worst enemy. He does so not connivingly, but blindly,
because he has no reason to trust the people he trusts, or necessarily
not believe the ones he doesn't believe; yet he does trust one side
and distrusts the other, but we in the audience don't really get to go
along.
Maybe it was because he was not a wholly sympathetic character that I
didn't feel any loss when his paperwork gets scattered to the winds at
the end. Too bad he didn't fall off the ferry like his predecessor,
the film would have been a bit shorter and more to the point. Maybe
I'm also less than thrilled with this film because I don't remember
ever seeing either Polanski or Brosnan involved in a cinematic
International human rights drama before. I don't know for sure why it
bothers me that they're involved in one in this film. Polanski has
nerve, pointing the finger at the United States.
Why did Polanski tackle this modest script? I think it is because he
feels that he is himself a victim of the United States, but he
replaces the Justice Department, the L.A. County Prosecutor, with a
convenient assumed-to-be-evil C.I.A and Washington political
establishment. I know what bothers me. The film is made from a point
of view that judges recent U.S. foreign policy as criminal, and that
those who supported it are culpable; and that undercover agents had
better scramble and hide. I can watch a movie like that, but I can't
go "Yaaaaay!" Not while I THINK a 'war on terror' is still going
on.
Nope, I can't swallow the continuing European notion that our
intelligence-gathering and foreign policy folks are killers and
torturers and this movie's proposition: That a British P.M. who went
along with Washington's wartime policies against detainees deserves to
be sent to trial at The Hague, as if D.C. policiies and policy makers
can rightly be judged by a jury of their peers in the Netherlands.
Thus it is that neither Polanski's directorial abilities or Brosnan's
or Ewan McGregor in a starring role, can wholly redeem this film from
being an unhappy piece of anti-Americana. It is also somewhat slow ,
listless, and lacking much of a climax. There is some hanky-panky
that may be taking place, but nothing is seen of it. The one sexual
moment in the film comes across as a bit comical, causing the audience
to ripple with giggles. Kim Cattrall has "Sex in the City" written all
over her, so she doesn't have to do a THING in this movie to look
good, and to be the obvious "other other". Olivia Williams is
adequate as the Brosnan character's grim and nervous wife, but nothing
she does prepares us for a revelation at the end. The revelation of
her official ties means nothing in the light of her behavior earlier
in the film.
As I indicated earlier with a distended rain gauge, most of the film
takes place during a lengthy rain storm. This is okay if you want to
bond with the one glass-walled house half the movie takes place in, as
we see sheets of rain like waterfalls out every window. Polanski
can't film in the U.S., so he must have chosen the wettest place along
the North Sea to film his quiet homage to The Hague. No wonder this
rather flat piece is rating 82% on "Rotten Tomatoes", you just have to
assume, as does Ewan McGregor's "Ghost Writer" character, that if the
former Prime Minister of England collaborated with Washington, and a
suspected terrorist died during intense interrogation, that P.M. must
have the soul of a killer and his 624-page manuscript deserves to be
stolen and shared with the author's worst enemies . I seem to be
repeating myself because the film's so fresh in my mind. I will go run
some cold water over my head and maybe the film and its rainstorm will
go away.
There is a singular event featuring a grudge-bearing man with a rifle
on top of a building, that could have been the climax right there,
since after that, the whole point of continuing the gambit is over.
Instead we get an unlikely anti-climactic end, not a cyber-ending but
a cypher-ending. At least by about 2/3rds of the way through the
movie, the lengthy rainstorm comes to an end!
Other than the elements mentioned above, I must say that I was and
still am fascinated with the whole process of ghost-writing, and if
that's why you go see this movie such as the beginning scenes of
publisher, agent, editor and prospective ghost writer, maybe you'll
enjoy that part. But the ghost writer was a fool. Ghost writers stay
in the background, they don't grandstand like this. What silly
behavior for an experienced ghost writer!
Best, -----Ed http://www.edaugusts.com
http://twitter.com/edaugusts