Movies: The Ghost Writer

Roman Polanski’s 2010 movie features Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor

The Ghost Writer, directed by Roman Polanski, who co-wrote the script with Robert Harris, whose 2007 novel The Ghost is the basis for this film, explicates the death of art.

This foreboding theme thrives within a taut thriller starring Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan with supporting players Kim Cattrall and Olivia Williams. The plot centers upon a ghostwriting assignment for the memoirs of a British prime minister. The whole movie is a little ridiculous if you pick it apart. Somehow, it adds up.

What Polanski manages to accomplish with this brisk, crisp movie is an expression of the essence and precariousness of today’s honest intellectual in an increasingly totalitarian West. The writer writes in a pernicious society influenced, run or infiltrated by the military-industrial state against which Eisenhower forewarned. Outcast director Polanski, who fled conv…