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The Ghost Writer

Roman Polanski, Rated: MA

Reviewed by Jamie Dunk

18 Aug 2010

10:12am Wednesday, 18th August 2010

Roman Polanski's new film dramatises the US-UK "special relationship" dealt with in Richard Loncraine's recent release. It is a threatening film, levelling accusations in a cold and darkly-lit plot that cut to the heart of liberal, democratic British government (that is, to the heart of Britishness itself). These charges are laid amidst the new stratification of great powers in which Britain has essentially failed to find a place. The film is something like salt in this gaping wound.

It is a political thriller - and it is thrilling - but Polanski's film removes the narrative from the political action in question. A former prime minister, aptly played by Pierce Brosnan, finds himself at the centre of an ethical and legal drama; in the film his past is simultaneously rediscovered by the anonymous ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) and the thinking, vicious global public.

By treating high-end politics and deep, deep espionage through the avowedly sensationalist writing of a ghost, the film returns the complex and intangible human question to the heart of geopolitics. This is no international courtroom drama and it manages without tapping into the appeal of the spy. Human vulnerability is emphasised over and above the workings of power. The film is dominated by suspicion, anger and opportunism. The ghost writer is brought into this relational and political system in order to sanitise the narrative and make it palatable. His job is to explain and redeem the decisions of a prime minister, but it is frustrated by the strange silence surrounding the manuscript and the intrusive presence of its deceased author. He, unlike the ghost, had the confidence of the prime minister and a sure, Scottish identity. Even dead, his voice is stronger than any other. It has the ring of an unwelcome truth.

As the media and anti-war campaigners converge on the prime minister's history, the atmosphere is pressurised and the already strained relationships and tenuous historical narrative begin to unravel. Who was this man who held the reigns of a once great power? Are political leaders empowered to lead or set up for moral and political failure as the people purge their confused consciences after the fact? Is there any moral ground in modern warfare?

The settings are evocative if too clearly manufactured - comfortless strongholds ill-equipped to defend against the threat from within. As the rain beats, the protesters' vitriol grows, the publication deadline looms and we wonder whether any defences could possibly protect this dissociative statesman from his past - and, because Polanski is a masterful director, we begin to wonder whether there will ever be anything other than oppressive windswept skies.

As each defence is pierced, twisted and even inverted, the moral compass oscillates. Do any of the characters have integrity, past or present? We know only the writer - and he is a nameless, characterless truthsayer, slightly hard-boiled and set to disappear. The question resounds as the film comes home with vigour: is any such searching for the truth amidst the machinations of the great powers doomed to flicker and die out in the gusts of personal and political obscurantism? As an exercise in historical conjecture rather than investigative art, the Ghost Writer has something of the prophetic voice, and we might do well to listen to it.