REACHING the counter, the woman in the cinema queue didn’t ask for tickets for The Ghost Writer; she said, “Two for the Polanski, please.” That, as I heard it, wasn’t about Roman Polanski’s eminence as a film auteur; it had to do with notoriety. It is widely known that the Polish director of many polished thrillers is also, allegedly, the author of serious crimes and misdemeanours in the United States, and that he refuses to leave his shelter in Switzerland to face the charges; it is known almost as widely that in America, in 1967, he suffered the horrific murder of his wife Sharon Tate. Some have proposed that the latter is almost an exoneration of the former. Others, jumping in on the free-for-all blogging, have insisted that his bad character is a reason to stay away from any film with his name on it.
It’s not. Apply that kind of rule, and there’d be a lot we wouldn’t be watching or hearing; the potent mix of celebrity and scandal has added frissons to movie-going through the entire history of Hollywood. Generally the profit is to the stars of performance rather than to directors; Polanski is perhaps the first of those to make such headlines in the half-century or more since Ingrid Bergman ran away with Roberto Rossellini. It’s a better story when, as in that case, both players are superlative; Rossellini was one of the very greatest directors. Polanski’s not in that class, though I yield to none in my enjoyment of Chinatown and The Fearless Vampire Killers.
He made The Ghost Writer, it’s said, while under house arrest. It’s a glamorous, expensive thriller, well below his best. The unnamed ghost, played likeably by Ewan McGregor, is drawn by his unsavoury agent into agreeing to rewrite the memoirs of a deeply unpopular former prime minister of Britain, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), who faces general hostility for pulling his country into war. The CIA is involved; Lang is in danger of facing the International Criminal Court; he may have colluded in the rendition of prisoners to torture. The ghost’s original commission gets lost; the manuscript, at first sight merely bland and wordy, holds clues to a history in which privileged young Cambridge men were for sale to their country’s enemies in youth, and pursued corrupted careers thereafter.
There are obvious echoes of Tony Blair’s story in Adam Lang’s, and further echoes of Kim Philby and company. But we don’t even know which party was led by Lang; the politics here have only to do with money and power as such, and the CIA is the malign overarching force; the winners – like Lang’s wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) – survive by playing its games according to the rules. She and the PA–mistress Amelia (Kim Cattrall), the two women of the story, are both schemers and traitors; in its sexism, as in much else, The Ghost Writer is a very old-fashioned exercise. Its interest for the present is in the way CIA paranoia can now be taken for granted; it’s a very long time since that lot were anywhere near the good guys. If there’s a moral question sniffing around anywhere, it has to do with the ghost’s profession and his choices at the outset; taking up that role, for six-figure fees, is any honour possible?
Some reviewers have invoked Hitchcock, but Polanski has nothing like the master’s wit. What he does have is a stunning sense of landscape and atmosphere. The setting for high conspiracy is on Martha’s Vineyard on the north American coast, with long bleak beaches, pale grass on rainy dunes, and that holiday house (a Lloyd Wright job?) with its expensive timber and concrete, the politician’s spacious bolthole. Those, the huge ferry terminal, and a cold sea heaving with metaphor, all make the film worth your money – briefly. If Polanski’s personal ordeals can generate greater cinematic excellence, it’s still to come.
MUCH has already been written about David Michôd’s brilliant thriller Animal Kingdom, which won a big prize at Sundance and is now finishing its run on the circuits. There has been argument, online and elsewhere; I think the people who didn’t like it were, mistakenly, looking for realism. But this film’s special pleasures won’t be available if you expect documentary values and go there for real-life meanings about Melbourne criminal gangs; nor if you get stuck on plotting, and reflect too far on a young man’s initiation into patterns of gunplay and revenge. (For that, return to A Prophet.) This is absolutely formal film noir; character and action play out, superbly, according to the conventions of the genre. No detail of performance or setting exceeds its function in the pattern, and everything ends as it must. Orchestration is everything, and because of its completeness you can watch a low-angle shot along a suburban hallway, looking toward a section of a kitchen with fridge and stove – no talent in sight – and take in the sense of threat. The process is assisted by Antony Partos’s music; long, probing organ notes, sounding as if it were under the floorboards, let us know that the fates won’t be evaded.
Within the ensemble, the casting takes individual stories as far as they need to go. Ben Mendelsohn’s murderous Pope and Jacki Weaver’s Smurf communicate varieties of evil; Weaver’s portrait of malignly enveloping mother-love is out of the darker Hitchcock (a real echo there). The young men, James Frecheville’s Josh at the centre and Luke Ford’s hapless Darren on the sidelines; the silent, sinister cops; the vignette of family relations around the doomed girlfriend Nicky (Laura Wheelwright); the way the glib, case-hardened barrister (Anna Lise Phillips) produces a rundown for the defence of Pope – all form a network in which the innocent might thrash and flounder, but they won’t get out. It’s visibly and palpably a Melbourne film; there should be more where it came from. •
