The Ghost Writer (2009)
Directed by Roman Polanski
It’s more of a stereotype that directors usually reinvent themselves all the time: they usually do it because they make films for a certain audience, and audiences aren’t likely to tolerate variations of the same film; hence, you have directors shifting genres, or directors that used to shoot dramas, shooting comedies, or the other way around, significantly transforming their cinematic visions over the years. And there are those directors that, if the audiences were to mysteriously vanish into the air one day, would probably make the same film over and over again. Roman Polanski, whose directorial style has visibly changed during the decades he has been making films, is the kind of director that would make, not necessarily the same film, but the same films, over and over, even if his audiences haven’t vanished. More than once you watch a Polanski film and you have the feeling that you’ve seen another film made by him, with a different plot, but nevertheless similar to the one you’re watching. The bizarre characters in his Cul-de-Sac feel like a version of the triangle from Knife in the Water; The Tenant, some critics say, it’s another version of his paranoia-infested Repulsion. These pairs of films aren’t necessarily remakes or sequels, but you cannot escape the feeling they are about the same thing. The same thing goes for Polanski’s latest film, The Ghost Writer, a film with a different plot than that of his The Tenant, but ultimately a reprise of the 1976 film. Of course, not as much as the plot is concerned; the story seems more close to the paranoid thrillers made by Alan J. Pakula in the seventies: a modest writer, unaware of politics, founds himself involved in a conspiracy that threatens to reveal certain connections between a former British prime minister and the United States. Surprisingly enough, Polanski goes for a genre reminiscent of the seventies, which certainly had its ups and downs (who will remember today efforts like Enemy of the State?) and which seems to enjoy a quiet revival nowadays, if you take into account just Kevin Macdonald’s excellent State of Play. Never in his long career has Polanski made a film that addresses so blunt the politics, besides his 1994 Death and the Maiden. Nevertheless, even if The Ghost Writer has all the characteristics of its genre, including a last-minute twist, it adds something else in the mix, something that we could label “Polanskian” if it weren’t already present as a trait of the late literary modernism: the ideas of fatalism and predetermination.
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It’s debatable how much of Polanski’s vision of The Tenant is owed to the original material, Roland Topor’s novel, Le locataire chimérique, as in the novel the main character, Trelkowski, already identifies with the fate of the previous tenant, who committed suicide. It’s much clearer, anyhow, that both Trelkowski and the anonymous main character of The Ghost Writer are victims of a mysterious predetermination, as if their fate was identical to that of Oedipus, in the sense that he also was experiencing precisely the events that the oracle prophesied for him, in spite of his efforts to avoid it. However, it’s almost certain that in the case of The Ghost Writer, it was Polanski’s idea to add to the plot the same idea of predetermination as one can find in The Tenant, since Polanski also penned the script, together with the author of the novel The Ghost, Robert Harris. Indeed, the main character of the film, played by Ewan McGregor, assigned to ghostwrite the memoirs of a preeminent British ex-prime minister, Adam Lang, after the initial ghostwriter, a certain McAra, a member of Lang’s staff, has mysteriously drowned, finds himself inexplicably linked to McAra’s fate. The day he composes a statement for Lang, he is told that his clever phrases have certain McAra-like qualities. As the story unfolds, the ghostwriter will be given at the beach villa the room McAra was living in and, eventually, will get to use the car that McAra was driving. As the car still has set on its satellite navigation device the last address McAra visited, the ghostwriter will literally drive the same route as McAra did on his possibly last trip, in a scene in which modern technology replaces the ancient oracle. Obviously, the main character is at first discomforted by the allusions, trying to wipe out his ghost from the villa, throwing away a pair oh McAra’s slippers as soon as he finds them and (at first) insisting on not using the car McAra used to drive. The fact that he seems to identify more and more with the defunct ultimately gives him a panic attack, in a scene where he escapes the ferry that was supposed to take him back to the beach villa. In a funny way, if you’re an admirer of what Polanski did wit The Tenant, the suspense of The Ghost Writer will reside mostly in the ghostwriter’s fate, and not in the ultimately predictable riddle of the plot: will the director fully transform The Ghost Writer into The Tenant? will he let the ghostwriter share Trelkowski’s fate?
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It’s easy to believe that the Berlinale Jury that awarded Polanski a Silver Bear for Best Directing this year for The Ghost Writer awarded somehow the prize equally to the Polanski that made The Tenant. You simply cannot ignore the resemblance between the two films, that is, if you’re willing to surpass first the surface idea that The Ghost Writer is a film with a hidden agenda, a film about a fictional character that is supposed to be something of a Tony Blair impersonation, an idea very popular among the film’s reviews on the internet. And it’s even entirely plausible, if Robert Harris’s The Ghost weren’t published before the emergence of Tony Blair. Anyhow, the film in itself seems to make its position about politics very clear, as Polanski seems more amused than involved into serious ideas about geopolitics. The politician in the film, impersonated by Pierce Brosnan so vividly, that there have been numerous comments on the internet already about his wasted years as Bond, is a weak and ridiculous character, lacking charisma and having a single strong point, his team, that clearly got him elected before his natural charm. Polanski’s art comes from the way he manages to surround the obvious satirical figure that Lang is with a plot that’s as claustrophobic and somber as it gets: the atmosphere of the film resembles the constant cloudy weather we can see through the windows of the villa. With a little help from Alexandre Desplat’s excellently-synchronized soundtrack, the film manages to be as threatening as it is elegantly directed. Through his almost natural craft, Polanski gets to tell the prologue of the film, a scene in which McAra’s car is found empty on the boat that was supposed to bring him back to the villa, with almost no dialogue. Even more impressive, the last five minutes of the film show a confident director, who knows how to put things in a new light, as a carefully enacted scene shows a note being handed about in the crowd at the book launch. Then, it’s time for the sudden, abrupt ending; as he did on previous occasions, in Chinatown, for example, Polanski removed the interior monologue from the script, so onscreen viewers will see almost only the things the main character is experiencing, without being warned about anything. In a way, this tempered Polanski is the Polanski we have been waiting for years, and you cannot be anything else but happy that his grandiose Pompeii project, based on another of Harris’ books had failed. Instead of making a historical film of epic scales, Polanski delivered this efficient, balanced and austere Ghost Writer. It might not be the thriller that the audiences waited for 2010 from any director, but it is as subtle as it is interesting and ultimately funny for it genre. There might be the reason why, in the advertising campaign for The Tenant, Paramount Pictures coined the phrase “No one does it to you like Roman Polanski” – Polanski, who’s now 76, still has the ability to surprise you with a film whose ending you already know (it’s inherent to its genre), but nevertheless makes you wonder how such a beautiful craft is possible.
