The Ghost Writer

[4.0
stars] [IMDb Link]

[Amazon Link]
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It's a movie co-written and directed by a truly despicable human being, Roman Polanski. It has a plot that sounds like the wet dream fantasy of your prototypical leftist paranoid conspiracy freak, relentlessly anti-American.

And yet, I kind of liked it. (Explanation/excuse below.)

Pierce Brosnan plays ex-British Prime Minister Adam Lang, hunkered down in a remote corner of Martha's Vineyard, trying to get his memoirs completed. Complication: the mysterious death of his ghostwriter, drowned after falling off the Vineyard's ferry. (Or was he pushed?) Worse, the International Criminal Court is making noises about indicting Lang for "war crimes", because he OKd grabbing some terrorists out of Pakistan and obligingly handed them over to the CIA.

Not to worry: Ewan McGregor quickly steps up to the ghostwriting plate, lured by a promised quarter-million dollar fee. But he quickly finds he's plunged into intrigue, as little bits of Lang's story don't add up, Lang's wife is continually sniping with Lang's pretty assistant (played by Kim Cattrall, so we're pretty sure what's going on there). Then the new ghost finds some mysterious pictures and notes hidden away by the old ghost, and things get really creepy.

The movie invites you to see Lang and his wife as thinly disguised versions of Tony and Cherie Blair. Lang gets charter-jetted around on a plane marked "Hatherton" (i.e. Haliburton) He's shown meeting with a Condoleezza Rice lookalike. And the shadowy neocon conspiracy running everything is …

Oh, never mind. I would guess even a lot of the aforementioned leftist paranoid conspiracy freaks would find it embarrassingly farfetched, a little too pandering to their fantasies. Since I switched off that part of my brain about three minutes in, I was able to enjoy the movie on that basis.

Pierce Brosnan really does a good job playing the charismatic, albeit disgraced, ex-PM. (The only false note is when he goes a tad too obviously Nixonian in one scene.)

And it was nice to say: "Hey, you know who that is? That's Eli Wallach!"


Last Modified 2024-01-30 1:15 PM EDT