UK Release Date: 16-04-2010
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall
UK Certificate: 15
Director: Roman Polanski
Country: France/Germany/UK

When Ewan McGregor’s ghost writer is offered a large cheque to redact the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), he does so with all the down-at-heel, whisky-weary lack of enthusiasm of which a journalist is capable. Lang is living in exile on a chilly, windswept island off the US coast, a forbidding landscape where hearts are, nevertheless, warmer towards him than are those on the other side of the Atlantic. The once charismatic British Prime Minister has long since fallen from favour at home: “He wasn’t a politician, he was a craze”. As our whisky-loving journo delves deeper into Lang’s past he proves to be just a bit too good at his job, unearthing what looks like a scoop compared to which our MPs’ expenses scandal pales, but that our hero’s predecessor as prime ministerial ghost writer was found drowned and washed up on that cold modern-day Elba ought to set alarm bells ringing. Lang is threatened with indictment for war crimes and trial at The Hague; later, the writer’s clandestine meeting with Lang’s former Foreign Secretary, Robert Rycart (Robert Pugh, looking like a cross between Charles Clarke and the late Robin Cook), now at the UN, underlines the enormity of what has been stumbled upon.

Polanski’s The Ghost begins with a Hitchcockian soundtrack and credits flourish, but whereas Hitchcock gave us dazzling blondes and Technicolor warmth to offset his cold directorial hand, Polanski gives us bitch fights in landscapes as barren and interiors as murky as the souls of the protagonists. As a thriller, The Ghost is more eyebrow- than hair-raising, but it is directed by a master who, scene by scene, unfurls an implacable and compelling narrative. The obvious conspiracy theory targets – the CIA, big business, arms manufacturers – are attacked in a spirit heavy on liberal outrage, light on political satire, although Lang is, pointedly, certainly more charming and almost as convincingly narcissistic as Tony Blair. McGregor’s hapless ghost writer is a mixture of stumbling bemusement, laconic charm and rank stupidity. Kim Cattrall as Lang’s PA is always one smiling innuendo away from Sex in the City-Samantha, but then she is a secretary who, it is suggested, takes down more than just Lang’s appointments behind closed doors. Although Cattrall is never given quite enough to do by the plot, the bared cougar claws between herself and Lang’s shrewd and long suffering wife are entertaining. Olivia Williams is excellent as Blighty’s First Lady, on the surface more Carla Bruni than Cherie Blair, underneath more Hillary Clinton than Michelle Obama.

Everything is experienced from the ghost writer’s point of view, and so, as he follows his journalistic nose with his eyes closed, a large portion of the cast don’t appear until the film’s final climactic act. While this might prove problematic in the hands of a lesser director, it is here that Polanski’s mastery is most in evidence: the sense of menace when presented with an apparently deserted forecourt at night; the hint of threat in a friendly wave from silhouetted figures in the distance; an open expanse of landscape becoming as murky as the intrigue. There is one moment in the film, during a conversation in a seemingly deserted hotel with a bizarrely-dressed, sleepy receptionist who appears from the dark recess of an alcove, in which the camera just perceptibly pans right in the direction of the darkness from which she has emerged. The effect is almost subliminally unnerving. Continuity error or stroke of genius, I am still not quite sure.

The screenplay, by Polanski and Robert Harris (based on Harris’s novel), owes much to the conspiranoia of the early 1970s, an age when, as now, all the president’s men were out to get us. Still, it’s a tale which recalls David Drury’s Defence of the Realm from the Thatcherite 1980s as much as it does The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor from that era of post-Nixon paranoia. It bears some strikingly similar similarities to them all, beyond mere genre tropes, not least of all its ending.

As political commentary, The Ghost is a tap into an open goal rather than a surgical strike. As thriller, it is a film with barely an incidence of gunfire which yet holds the attention, studded with decent one-liners and choice Anglo-Saxon expletives and helmed by a past master who, while seemingly effortlessly following his directorial nose with his eyes closed amid the threat of his own personal Hague, keeps the viewer’s eyes wide open.