Salina Art Center

Director Roman Polanski, as everyone knows, was arrested in 1977 for having sexual relations with a minor (the girl was 13 years old at the time), fled the U.S. to avoid sentencing, and has remained (and worked) in semi-exile since then, mostly in France.  And though he may never reach the heights of his older films, which include Chinatown, Repulsion, and Rosemary’s Baby, he’s still created a respectable body of work since his flight, culminating in a Best Director Academy Award for The Pianist.  Undoubtedly, Polanski’s a controversial figure, and it’s difficult to applaud his artistic merits in light of his crime, which is serious—and the fact that he’s evaded legal justice for it.  Nevertheless, one can’t help but appreciate the quality and intelligence that still pervade his best films.  His most recent, The Ghost Writer, is one of the best, and a reminder that Polanski was once considered Alfred Hitchcock’s most likely heir for the mantle of “Master of Suspense” in the early ‘70’s.  Like all great thrillers, the premise is simple but allows for permutations and plot twists to develop gradually: Ewan McGregor is “The Ghost,” an unnamed writer who gets a $10 million advance to ghost write the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, now living in New England.  The Ghost has a predecessor: another ghost writer started the project but mysteriously drowned, leaving a decidedly dull, uneventful, partially-completed manuscript.  McGregor’s “Ghost” does a little digging and soon discovers that Lang’s past is actually quite full of juicy, exciting material—perhaps too exciting for his own safety.  Based on the best-seller by Robert Harris, The Ghost Writer builds slowly and increases the tension bit by bit.  It’s a welcome throwback to the Hitchcock school, when thrillers took the time to make audiences emotionally invested in the characters, gradually developed a mood of ominous anticipation and uncertainty, and then put the heroes in constant danger so that even seemingly tame sequences of characters trying to pass messages to one another became nail-biting, intense set-pieces.  These films didn’t rely on gory deaths, stylized mayhem, hyper-edited fight scenes, or shootouts with AK-47’s.  They tapped into the moviegoer’s simultaneous delight and apprehension at the prospect of investigating dark, deeply-hidden secrets.  The Ghost Writer is saturated in this kind of goose bump-raising atmosphere, and the primary setting helps mightily: most of the action takes place in and around Lang’s country house, nestled near the wintry, grey coastline of Martha’s Vineyard (actually filmed near the British Isles).  That setting also deliberately evokes traditional mystery novels in the Agatha Christie mould, where a group of characters, each with a private agenda, come together at an isolated English manor for a weekend of murder.  Complementing McGregor’s intelligent, troubled loner is Pierce Brosnan as Adam Lang: sly, acerbic, charismatic, and menacing—the actor obviously enjoyed the chance to work outside his bland James Bond persona and show what a magnetic, forceful presence he can be.  The supporting cast is equally terrific: Jim Belushi, Timothy Hutton, Olivia Wilde, Kim Cattrall, and Tom Wilkinson make vivid impressions as, respectively, a sleazy publisher, Lang’s attorney, Lang’s coldly calculating wife, his mistress, and a law professor who might know the secret to Lang’s shady past.  Polanski-haters might raise an eyebrow over a life-meets-art parallel in the film: Lang (who is clearly modeled on former PM Tony Blair) has fled to the U.S. rather than face a war crimes investigation; but Polanski has always been interested in “outsiders,” his heroes often loners who entered an alien environment, where they became objects of hostility or manipulation.  It’s interesting that in The Ghost Writer, the exile is the villainous figure, not the protagonist (though Ewan McGregor is mysterious, too).  The Ghost Writer isn’t really a larger statement about Polanski’s life or the invasion of Iraq—it’s a political conspiracy thriller of the kind produced in the Watergate Era, paranoid classics like The Conversation and Three Days of the Condor.  As critic Peter Travers of Rolling Stone says, it’s one of Polanski’s “diabolical best.”