The Ghost

No credits. No trailers. No marketing at all. Not even a title. This is how movies should be shown to critics. Otherwise the results can be messy. Reactions, appreciations and judgements can so easily get tangled up in the allure of reputation and the tyranny of oeuvre. Take The Ghost, for instance, the new movie from Roman Polanksi. Yes, Roman Polanksi – he of Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Pianist and much-troubled private life.

The movie opens in pulse-quickening style, with composer Alexandre Desplat’s strings hacking away on the soundtrack as a body is washed up on shore. Yes, we say, this is the Polanksi of Knife in the Water and of Repulsion. He’s back!

The film is based upon the Robert Harris novel, a thinly veiled attack upon Tony Blair, here called Adam Lang, and played with ophidian relish by Pierce Brosnan. Lang is holed up in his publisher’s mansion on Martha’s Vineyard where he is attempting to write his memoirs with the aid of a ghost writer.

The only snag is that Lang is being publicly pursued by a UN war crimes tribunal for his role in extraordinary rendition; he is hated by his wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams, playing Cherie Blair as a stony-faced martinet); he is somehow tangled up with the CIA; and his previous ghost writer has died under very suspicious circumstances. Enter an unnamed, novice ghost, played with a malformed cockerney chirp by Ewan McGregor, and the stage is set for a labyrinthine trip to the sinister base of political power. Well, that’s the plan anyway.

The reality, though, is a series of fundamentally dispiriting moments that are seemingly insulated from criticism by the Polanski brand. Thus a shockingly tedious opening conversation in a publishing office, when McGregor says, “And that’s what sells autobiographies – heart!” is clearly Polanksi being ironic, isn’t it? Or a red double-decker bus that passes clumsily across frame in an early ‘London’ scene is Polanksi being arch, no?

Then there are the countless pivotal scenes in Lang’s seaside office, where key conversations are played out against a fake seafront view (actually Brosnan walking in front of a green screen, with sea view inserted digitally, like a weather map on TV) – this must surely be Polanski playing with visual tropes, hinting us towards the disconnect between appearance and reality, yes?

However, by the time you get to the second act climax in which McGregor reacts to a piece of information with the expository yelp, “Oh my God! Do you realise how important this is? This explains why Lang went into politics!” you can only surmise, somewhat shakily, that this is Polanski ridiculing the tenets of the thriller genre, er, isn’t it?

Whereas, sadly, when the biggest narrative moment of that act is played out in front of a computer screen, with McGregor doing a Google search (yep, he uncovers the movie’s central narrative mechanics on Google), or when the entire film ends with the kind of cheap throwaway twist familiar to anyone who’s seen either Presumed Innocent or Sea of Love, you have to finally throw your hands in the air and admit that the whole movie is actually Polanski being, well, shit.

Kevin Maher

Anticipation:

Polanski does Harris doing Blair. Unmissable.

Enjoyment:

A gradual process of disillusionment.

In Retrospect:

Utterly shocking.