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 conviction of a sex crime in the United States, renders an ardent political film about artistry. The 2010 movie caps his career’s intellectual odyssey; like Rosemary’s Baby, The Ghost Writer is a kind of horror film.

Music by Alexandre Desplat—one of Desplat’s best film scores—injects an urgent intensity that Polanski films often lack. Kim Cattrall adds a perfect twist of brevity. Timothy Hutton excels as always in a small yet pivotal role. Tom Wilkinson instills a dash of mystery. Ewan McGregor delivers one of his best performances as a bright but guarded and skeptical writer who fails to appreciate his own ability—and the cost of being cynical—before it’s too late. Pierce Brosnan is always underrated.

The subtext here is that everyone in the audience—this means you—is the writer and that, to the extent the writer writes, he risks (and is at risk of) becoming a ghost. The picture’s ending is particularly astute given today’s cultural depravity and imperiled civilization. Remember this if you haven’t seen The Ghost Writer. Should you choose to watch, mind the puzzle as it comes together, including how the writer’s recruited, treated and tracked. A thin line between life and death becomes visible in plain sight. Ten years before Trump (who followed others, including brave young Snowden) sounded an alarm about an entrenched “deep state,” Roman Polanski’s British-made The Ghost Writer depicts and accuses a cabal that functions to poison how you know what you know—about everything worth knowing. Starting with the one who writes.