Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Ewan McGregor
Pierce Brosnan
Olivia Williams
Kim Cattrall
Directed By:
Roman Polanski
Cinéma d'auteur, mes amis, is a notion that is dead, at least in it's classical form. Nobody cares anymore about what Jean-Luc Godard has to say about the history of cinema through editing and clever use of visual quotations. Unfortunately for Roman Polanski, he belongs to that era. Save for The Ninth Gate, done twelve years ago, his career has been oriented around his early success and the sexual scandal around his name, more than around his movies. The Ghost Writer is a good story, well-developed and well-paced, but it won't go down in history as an unforgettable piece of cinema.
Roman Polanski co-wrote the script with Robert Harris, who wrote crazy detail oriented novels like Fatherland and Enigma, so I knew before even popping this bad boy into my Playstation 3 that the story would be damn good. And it is. After the death of Adam Lang (Brosnan)'s ghost writer, a new one is hired...Ewan McGregor! Being smarter than his predecessor (and also having half the job already done), he quickly discovers that there's something wrong with his new employer, who happens to be tried at The Hague for war crimes. When the seemingly unnamed character of McGregor starts to double check his predecessor's work, he starts investigating the protagonists of the stories...and it happens that the text is more than what it seems.
Like I said, it's a damn good story, but that's all there is. Polanski seemed to have wanted to do justice to the plot and adopted a self-effacing style. It's not stylish, but yet it tried hard. It's a little slow, due to his use of long shots and wide angles where two dots on the beach just walk and discuss. It's a very cinéma d'auteur choice and it doesn't help conveying the energy of a political thriller. Maybe the life of a ghost writer looks like this, but many times during the viewing I tipped over and said: "Uuuuuuuuuuuuugh, get on with things already". Art movies always work better with simple subjects. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind for example is a movie about love and break-ups , so it can be creative and thorough, it's supposed to invoke clear images. Political power struggles are anything but clear. Information needs to be filtered at a steady pace.
Anyway, as you can guess, I liked the movie as a whole, but I thought Roman Polanski tried his best to ruin it. But hey, it's his movie after all, his last hurrah before he went AWOL because of that fishy pedophilia accusation. So I guess he tried to gather as much attention as he could. Ewan McGregor is a convincing mild-mannered Englishman and I could believe Pierce Brosnan's arrogance. The flashy, graceful camera work by Polanski didn't do them justice though. It's frustrating to sit through a two hours movie that deliberately tries to slow things down and admire itself. The cons outweights the pros...but hey, I'd read the novel.
SCORE: 67%
