“The Ghost Writer” is a movie about systemic lack of respect for women and the urgent need to extradite criminals.
And guess who directed it? Roman Polanski, you are the mayor of Chutzpahtown.
Easily losing the race to be the best Massachusetts-island-based film noir of the week, this corny paranoid thriller takes place on an unnamed, Martha’s Vineyard-ish offshore community. Here, a ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) is helping construct the memoirs of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) named Adam Lang, though he might as well be called Bony Flair.
Lang is forced to cool his heels in the US because it doesn’t recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which is about to charge him with war crimes. This American lapdog even has a Cherie Blair-look-alike wife (Olivia Williams) and a meeting with a Condi Rice doppelganger at the State Department.
The movie is rendered one big double-entendre by the leisure pursuits that have made Polanski a fugitive for more than 30 years. “Cheeky bugger!” exclaims Lang, when he learns his own foreign secretary is going to rat on him. Takes one to know one, Roman.
When Williams gives a speech about how women are disrespected, one pictures Polanski behind the camera chatting about his feminist principles with a young assistant whom he then invites out for a drink. Perhaps she would join him for a juice box during recess?
Although the movie is reasonably suspenseful for a while and has a few witty moments (of a first draft, the ghost says, “All the words are there. They’re just in the wrong order”), it rings false. Timothy Hutton as a guy named “Sid Kroll”? Warning: Kim Cattrall tortures a British accent, Tom Wilkinson throws in a pinched try at an American one, and Brosnan makes a pass at sounding . . . I have no idea. Scottish?
At a ticket window for a Massachusetts ferry, the clerk offers “Single or return?” instead of “One-way or round-trip?”
The larger picture grows as sloppy as the details. It takes the movie more than an hour to establish what’s obvious to the audience from the start — that the ghostwriter’s predecessor was murdered. And it does so awkwardly: by throwing in a coincidental encounter with an exposition coot (Eli Wallach), an old man sitting in his shack waiting to spill the beans to whomever wanders by.
Also, you can’t have it both ways with sinister international decade-spanning conspiracies. Either nefarious agencies can see 30 years into the future and secretly yank every string from DC to Downing Street, or they’re too incompetent to pull off the simple assassination of an unarmed hack on a lonely country road. Not both.
A better idea would have been to show super-spies unable to complete a connect-the-dots puzzle. But then the film would have been a documentary.