A Closer Look: The Ghost Writer

But the tone here is pretty darned restrained for Polanski, who wants to keep McGregor’s everyman successor to Hitchcock’s Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart in the recognizable everyday world. The measure of his success in striking a balance is one’s sense that the nearly silent Asian housekeeper and her friendly husband offer threats of unknown nature, or at a minimum, surveillance.

The music is distractingly atmospheric, but the stark cement mansion with its large, strong abstract art in blacks and reds, sets a visual tone that Polanski matches with his setups. The spaces are grey, bleak and wintry, and the people mostly move through chilly scenes in three quarter shots and long shots. Even when Ruth (Olivia Williams) the prime minister’s wife makes love with the ghost, there is no intimacy as Polanski sets the camera across the room from the end of their bed and never cuts in.

Pierce Brosnan as Adrian Lang, the fictional surrogate for former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, here continues building the body of work that demonstrates he is the male Jessica Lange, both for too long underestimated and held back by their physical beauty. He portrays the lingering authority and creeping bewilderment of the out-of-office senior politician, his ability to operate on his own combined with the need for staff affirmation. His response on the jet back from DC when the ghost writer  suggests that he has been complicit with the CIA for decades is an extended moment of rejection, disbelief, self-defense, anger and uncertainty. Between that encounter and the plane’s landing Lang has processed the ghost’s claims and back at the seaside house he would have realized  that his wife has been handling him for the CIA. But immediately a mad, independent shooter kills Lang (who dies without a closeup, his legs buckling at the knees to express the lights-out swift effect of the head shot).

Polanski and Harris are inspired by Hitchcock on more than tone and look. The movie is a tease on the significant moral and political issue of whether Britain collaborated with the US in illegal renditions and torture of suspected terrorists, about which it asserts nothing. That theme is a MacGuffin, a narrative driver to motivate characters and keep the audience’s attention. The CIA has controlled for decades the wife of the rising and then dominant British politician. No one will ever know, given the CIA murder of one ghost writer, the independent murder of the man himself, and the random (?)  pedestrian homicide of the second ghost writer. But Brosnan’s emotional scene on the plane, declaring his independence, raises the distinct possibility that all of the CIA’s effort, including the deaths, is for nothing, because Lang acted out of belief rather than under his wife’s influence. Like Hitchcock, Polanski and Harris grant themselves sardonic smiles at their characters’ expense. What have even the winners accomplished?

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