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Rating: September 2009: the director Roman Polanski is arrested at Zurich airport for an old charge of sexual assault against a minor. The news makes its way around the globe and ends up on the pages of all the newspapers. One of the most famous and respected film men accused of a very serious crime. During the time when this case erupted, besides the usual opposition between "guilty" and "innocent," Roman Polanski brought to the big screen his 18th feature film, titled "The Ghost Writer".
Due to the aforementioned events, this film almost ended up in the background compared to other recent Polanski productions. While a title like "The Pianist" achieved great international fame for the many film awards it garnered, even the more modest "Oliver Twist" was more present on the global scene. To be clear: "The Ghost Writer" is not "Chinatown," much less "Rosemary's Baby" in terms of cinematic and artistic quality, but it is probably a film that did not receive the recognition it deserves.
Inspired by Robert Harris's novel of the same name (co-author of the screenplay), the film narrates the working experience of a "ghost writer" played by Ewan McGregor, tasked with writing the biography of the former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). This job was given to him after the previous writer, during the period of working on the biography, died under never fully clarified circumstances. The proximity to such a powerful man confronts our dear writer with questions far bigger than himself, and as often happens, the protagonist ends up becoming a sort of "political detective."
In this limbo of unsaid things and half-clues, Polanski constructs a visually "dark" film (kudos to the cinematography by Pawel Edelman) with a "classic" progression, aiming to slowly, perhaps too slowly, uncover the various implications of the story. The pace quickens at the end, when all the machinations of the "powerful" gradually come to light.
It is interesting to note how Polanski uses a "normal person" to depict the dark power games of politics. It's almost automatic to empathize with the ghost writer who suddenly finds himself inside a chessboard of spies, intrigue professionals, and violence. As if the filmmaker personifies the people in the figure of McGregor, so ordinary and far from the world in which he finds himself entangled. Not even too veiled is the attack on the militaristic attitudes of several countries (see England and the USA), so much so that many film critics saw in the figure of Adam Lang a clear reference to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his "policy of subservience" toward the U.S. cousins.
"The Ghost Writer" is a spy-thriller film that prefers dark atmospheres and a measured pace over the exasperated adrenaline now typical of the genre. Roman Polanski directs a film that innovates nothing in the field but resumes and partly reworks in a more modern way the "thrilling" overviews of his beginnings. A classic, linear work, packaged with the usual great stylistic mastery. The only flaw is dedicating screen time to sequences that do not have significant value in the economy of the film. Definitely successful, however, is the final scene: those sheets flying away in the wind, yet another hope of truth vanished, yet another demonstration of the smallness of man in the face of the vast darkness of a "world" that is better left untouched...
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