Roman Polanski (2010)

The attention being given to the picture is understandable.  Apart from the roman à clef aspect of the material, this is Polanski’s first feature since Oliver Twist and only his second since The Pianist, and he’s in the news again.  There’s an obvious resonance between the situation of the British former Prime Minister in the film (holed up on the US eastern seaboard) and its director (still under house arrest in Switzerland and presumably less keen than ever to cross the Atlantic).  The degree of praise for The Ghost is rather more of a mystery.  It’s a well-directed, not greatly sophisticated thriller.  As such, it’s a good deal less than you might expect from the director of Knife in the Water, Chinatown and The Pianist.   The picture has been released in America as The Ghost Writer but The Ghost is a better title because it can refer to both the main characters – the writer and the ex-PM, Adam Lang, whose reputation and popularity have been badly damaged by his association with the military adventurism of the US President (and who, shortly after the story begins, finds himself accused of war crimes).  Lang seems reduced to a shadow existence and to inhabit an afterlife:  the Boston coast house in which he’s writing his memoirs has an inhuman, sci-fi ambience.  (The blue-olive, green-drab-grey colour scheme of the picture, photographed by Pawel Edelman, is compelling but it holds the action in a vice.)

In Chinatown, which many people (not including me) think his finest film, Polanski changed the ending of Robert Towne’s screenplay to make things bleaker and underline the nastiness of the people in charge.  He has no need to do that here thanks to Robert Harris, on whose novel The Ghost the picture is based and with whom Polanski did the adaptation.   Harris, a former friend of Tony Blair, was moved by the invasion of Iraq to write this spiteful story, crying all the way to the bank.   In fact, Harris makes use of Blair’s CV only when he needs to.  When he wants to make Adam Lang dislikeable for things which Blair hasn’t been accused of, like being unfaithful to his wife, he goes fictional.   (And somehow even the fictional mud manages to stick.)    I’m 100% prejudiced against Robert Harris – partly because I still have a lot of time for Blair, partly because it enrages me that Harris, supposedly motivated by a sense of political betrayal  (which Harris may be arrogant enough to see as a personal one), responded with commercially canny treachery of his own.   The only Harris book I’ve read proves he was a crappy writer before the Iraq War and his falling out of friendship with Blair:  Enigma was the abominable source for an abominable film (except for Kate Winslet and, though it’s largely a cartoon performance, Jeremy Northam).  The characterisation and dialogue in Enigma were perfunctory to say the least – that clunkiness is in evidence again in The Ghost, although the direction and the performers are often good enough to obscure it.

Some of the plotting isn’t too hot and the denouement is especially unconvincing.   The (never named) ghost writer accuses Lang of being controlled by a Harvard law professor called Paul Emmett, who’s also a CIA operative (an emmet with one t is an ant – or ‘social insect living in organised colonies’).  When Lang hotly denies this and expresses disbelief that Emmett works for the CIA, the ghost says, ‘But I read it on the internet’ – and fair enough:  he’s unearthed this astounding information doing a Google search and finding out all he needs to know on the first page of responses to ‘Paul Emmett + CIA’.    The supposedly stunning revelation at the end of the film is that it’s not Lang who is in cahoots with the CIA but his wife Ruth.  (By this point, Lang has been shot dead – perhaps a jokey reminder from Harris to Blair that there are worse things than character assassination.)  Robert Harris (MA Cantab) may like to think of The Ghost as riffing on spy stories whose starting point is the recruitment by the KGB of a generation or two of Cambridge students.  The way that theme is recycled here is certainly a striking indication of what a bogey organisation the CIA has become (so that it’s interchangeable with the KGB in this context).  You can see too why the CIA stuff appealed to Polanski, given his understandably strong personal antipathy to the US authorities.  But this coup de théâtre is preposterous.  It’s incredible, given the media focus on the background of politicians and their wives (and the availability of internet search engines), that it wouldn’t already be public knowledge and food for frenzied speculation that Emmett was Ruth Lang’s tutor at Cambridge.  (Tony Blair went to Oxford and met Cherie Booth, an LSE graduate, in Derry Irvine’s chambers.  Indeed the last British Prime Minister to go to Cambridge was Stanley Baldwin:  David Cameron continues the overwhelming Oxford tradition – although Nick Clegg was at Cambridge.)

The Ghost depends partly on a natural antipathy to career politicians – the few laughs in a sparse Odeon audience (on a lovely, hot spring day) were predictable ones, although Pierce Brosnan as Lang is pretty hard to dislike.  What he does in this role is being overrated, however (a typical response to an actor doing something ‘more serious’), and his mid-Atlantic accent gives what I’d suspect is an unintentional reality to the idea of Lang/Blair being an American puppet.  When Lang appears in front of the cameras, his wife, watching on television, says under her breath, ‘Don’t grin’.  Of course he does.  The moment doesn’t make physiognomic sense:   the set of Tony Blair’s face makes him appear on the verge of a grin whenever he’s not looking determinedly unsmiling.  That’s not true of Pierce Brosnan’s face:  when he grins, it’s a foolish, obvious change of expression.  But what the hell:  people in the cinema still laugh, another cheap shot at Blair has found its target.  Brosnan is on screen for much less time than I expected – Ewan McGregor as the ghost writer certainly has the biggest role.  McGregor is good enough – he’s able to project modest intelligence and essential innocence – but the more I see him the more I think he gets so much work because his previous outing left little residue in the audience memory.  He’s appealing and skilful but his lack of lasting impact means that strong previous associations (he now seems unrecognisable from the startling young actor of Trainspotting) don’t get in the way.  The way the ghost writer gets drawn into events until he’s trapped by them faintly recalls what happens to Jack Nicholson’s J J Gittes in Chinatown and McGregor sometimes seems to want to make something amusing of the character’s being out of his depth.  But the script gives him no real scope for delivering on this.

The most striking figure is Olivia Williams as Ruth.  This is the kind of acting that often gets noticed at awards time but, except when Ruth briefly goes to pieces emotionally, Williams spits out her lines angrily, vengefully:  she’s monotonously accomplished.   (In looks and in performing style, Williams brings to mind a prettier Glenda Jackson – an association which gives the politicians-are-actors element of the material a presumably inadvertent edge.)  There are moments when Williams suggests that Ruth is, in spite of everything, in love with her husband and that’s maybe the strongest thing in the whole picture.  Even so, I like this actress better when she’s able to suggest something inside her character that contradicts the surface – as in (parts of) An Education, and Sex & Drugs & Rock and Roll.  When all Olivia Williams’s resources are focused on what’s salient, she’s harshly limited.  Kim Cattrall gives a broad, maladroit performance as Lang’s loyal assistant (and mistress) – but the role is so crudely written that she can hardly be blamed.  As Emmett, Tom Wilkinson is thoroughly professional and utterly unsurprising, right down to his nervous finger-tapping on the sides of the professor’s capacious armchair.  I was rather shocked not even to recognise Timothy Hutton as Lang’s lawyer.  Eli Wallach is enjoyably over the top as a canny old man who arouses the ghost’s suspicions about the supposedly accidental death of his predecessor in the job.  The ex-Foreign Secretary (Robert Pugh) seems as big a twit as we’re told the Americans who wanted rid of him think he is.  (I can’t believe even Robert Harris would have the nerve to misrepresent the late Robin Cook in this way – unless he upset Harris too.)  David Rintoul overacts as the military man whose son died in Iraq and who’s responsible for Lang’s assassination.

Alexandre Desplat’s score has some hints of Vertigo and more of North by Northwest – although the picture has none of the latter’s antic joie de vivre.    There are some lovely images (like the closing, melodramatic sight of the pages of the ghost’s manuscript blown in the wind across a darkening London street) and a few silly ones (on the photographs of Cambridge students, Pierce Brosnan’s head looks very obviously stuck onto someone else’s body).   Some of the best lines are shameless thefts.  Without his ghost, Lang is an inept writer:  ‘All the words are there – just a matter of putting them in the right order,’ says someone, without acknowledging Morecambe and Wise.  Tony Blair’s memoirs, entitled The Journey, are due to be published in September this year.  He may not have needed a ghost but, if he did, let’s hope it was a writer better than Robert Harris.

18 April 2010