The prow of the ferry in the first couple shots of Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer" isn't like any I've seen before. It raises up, like the visor on the headpiece of a suit of armor (or the crusher arm on a garbage truck), to let the cars on and off. It's just a little bit... odd, the sort of detail you'd expect Polanski would include -- not necessarily unsettling on its own but somehow menacing when seen through the lens of Roman Polanski. Moments later, the vehicles begin to disembark, with the exception of a car in near the front of the center lane that blocks traffic, creates a nuisance, and imparts dread. There's nobody in it. So, where did the driver go?
A few scenes later, a private plane lands at a small airport and we're given a shot of the fuselage framed around the (closed) door on the left and the first two windows on the right. Cut to a reverse angle of people waiting on the tarmac, and then back to the same basic configuration. The door pops open and it's one of those kind with the hinge on the bottom that folds down into a little set of stairs. The motion of the mechanism visually echoes the prow of the ferry. But there's something else in this shot that will come back to haunt us: the company name Hatherton, meant to recall Halliburton. It's just there, and it pops up in other shots throughout the movie, but it doesn't quite click into place until a Google search that hyperlinks pieces of various characters' pasts late in the film.
Again, no big deal. That's just one tiny piece of the mystery (which, if you're familiar with the evidence of real-life war crimes by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Tony Blair, turns out to be not that much of a mystery after all -- the crimes hinted at in the movie pale in comparison). But somebody put it there for you to notice, and the repetition of the aforementioned image of the side of the plane scratches at your awareness like a tick crawling on your neck. This is a Polanski thriller, which means it's sleek and sinister and every shot matters. If you ever ask yourself why you're looking at a particular image, you can be fairly confident you'll discover there's a good reason.
"The Ghost Writer" is not as crazy as "Frantic" (1988) -- a criminally underrated, North by Northwesterly paranoid chase movie -- but it's likewise loaded with off-kilter Polanski touches: the landscaper with the Sisyphean job, the dead man's slippers under the bed (shades of "The Tenant"), trying to ride a bike over gravel, the awkward consequences of trying to get away with doing something you know you shouldn't be doing, the intrusion at bath time, the jagged shards of repressed emotion that you didn't see coming...
The auditorium in which I saw it (Lincoln Square Cinemas in Bellevue, WA) was apparently using a nightlight for a projector lamp, so on my way out I checked one of the other theaters to see if it was any brighter. It was -- a bit. But I also noticed that this audience was getting the humor a lot better than the crowd with whom I'd just seen the picture. I almost stayed to re-watch it with this second group. They were more fun.
The story is based on a best-selling novel called "The Ghost" by Robert Harris, and the screenplay is credited to Harris and Polanski. (That's "and," not "&," which most likely means they did not work together. Harris wrote a screenplay and Polanski re-wrote it enough to get screen credit.) A ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) is hired to re-write the memoir of a former British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan -- fantastic performance!) who is accused of war crimes.
But enough with all the plot details. At least half the plot probably doesn't make any sense, anyway (like some of Hitchcock's plots), but the movie is so lithe it scarcely matters. (I don't know what the deal with the passed note is, either, but it sure makes for a nifty suspense shot.) Now I'm going to say something about the ending, so BEWARE OF SPOILERS.
As I sat there grinning at the final image (because this was the inevitable absurdist conclusion you just knew Polanski was shooting for) a guy behind me exclaimed: "That's it? That's the end?!" It sure is, and though you may not like it in story terms, formally and thematically it's exactly where it had to end. A few seconds into the shot, before anything really happens, you know that this is it (that's when I felt the smile spreading across my face) -- and not because, as in previous decades, you could see the emulsion thicken and the texture of the image flatten a bit because the end credits were soon to roll.
No, it's because we've been here before, in this very spot, on the sidewalk outside the book publisher's offices at the beginning of the film. [Shortly after the "ghost" got his assignment and left these offices,] two men on a motorcycle mugged him and stole a manuscript from him at the beginning of the film. Since then -- since the moment he took ghosting assignment -- he has been stalked by strange black cars. So, when we return to this place, and he exits the building again with a manuscript in his hand... we should sense the impending inevitable. It's a through street, but it's a cul-de-sac, and coming back here is as necessary as getting Jake Gittes back into Chinatown, or hearing the tenant's final scream...
19 Comments
I thought the movie was really pretty dumb. The plot was absurdly simplistic, and it's a political thriller about a ghost writer that has very little to do with politics or ghost writing.
For that reason, I don't think the ending was earned. It's an ironic, "aha" ending for a movie that wasn't smart enough to have an ironic ending. Scratch that, it wasn't even ironic. It was simply the rug being pulled out from itself, making the preceding two hours seem even more pointless than they originally did.
A perfectly sound, well made paranoid thriller until the very end, when the wheels came off. The Big Reveal itself makes a certain kind of sense, if you enjoy the kind of Cold War thriller where a KGB sleeper agent spends 25 years rising to a position of power, but the ending itself is unsound because i) the Ghost's discovery of the Big Reveal has not been properly set up, ii) the device by which the secret has been hidden in plain sight all along resembles nothing so much as the "Paul Is Dead" rumors about the Abbey Road cover, iii) what the Ghost immediately does when he learns the truth surpasses in implausible stupidity any behavior in a teenage horror movie, and iv) the consequences of his stupidity are incredibly too swift, because a) the Bad Guys wouldn't have known in advance that he knew the deadly secret, b) he discloses it anonymously, and c) there was no time to prepare their instantaneous reaction. Chintatown it's not.
Perfectly agree with you. The ending makes it impossible to suspend disbelief anymore. Disappointing since I enjoyed the first two hours.
I haven't caught The Ghost Writer yet, but I see about as much sense in quibbling over plot points in a Polanski flick as there is in complaining of plausibility issues in Shutter Island.
Like Scorsese, Polanski is a filmmaker for people who see with their eyes.
And, yeah, I watched Frantic again last year and found it as entertaining a collection of Euro character actors, menace and borderline-slapstick intrigue as Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.
I agree with Jack's second point above wholeheartedly; the others I can fill in the details myself (there are actually a ton of clues pointing to the big reveal throughout the film, and it's believable that the ghost would be strangely compelled to act so stupidly given his history with that person, and you'd assume the Bad Guys would be keeping an eye on someone they seemingly wanted dead earlier).
And my problem with the reveal isn't that it's childishly simple, and not even consistent within that set of rules. No, the problem I have with it is that it's out of character--neither of the ghosts should be satisfied with such a broad accusation. What we need in the final reveal is some concrete, verifiable evidence, and we don't get anything like that. It would have been far more incriminating to discover that he was a basketball coach, or something like that, than to skip to the conclusion.
I can only guess that the ending is the way it is to make sure everyone can easily understand the final twist. An almost-great film that was ruined by focus groups?
This is a bit off-topic, Jim, but I have to ask: Were you as annoyed as I was at the incredible number of times the F-word was dubbed over for something else? I counted 14 times. I mean, did the studio need a PG-13 rating that badly?
I read about that afterwards but, during the film, I honestly barely noticed...
*Spoilers*
I liked the movie but thought it was about forty minutes too long. We know the first ghost was killed and Brosnan is probably guilty but the movie takes at least forty or fifty minutes to get there. By the time the real thriller stuff kicks in, we've more or less figured everything out. Even the self-referential humor gets kind of redundant by the end.
I liked the turnaround with the Brosnan character, and he sold it well. Overrall I liked it best for three reasons: Jim Belushi, Eli Wallach and Tom Wilkinson.
Loved the film. Really wanting to see it again. Though I do share Chris' confusion over the fact that Polanski kept dubbing over the F-word; and though I agree with you that the ending is absolutely correct, the only part of it I would change is the fade to white before the credits roll. The last time Polanski used a "fade to white", it was with The Ninth Gate- and that time, it spoiled an otherwise underrated film. This time? It hardly did any damage, but still... there was no need for it. Unless it was supposed to reflect the whites of all the papers that are flying around.
by the way Jim, has your blog been altered so that you can't respond to our posts in italics? It seems like you actually have to create another post of your own every time you respond to someone. Sorry if you've already answered this question before!
SPOILER ALERT!
Both you and Roger have said that you don't really see what the note had to do with anything (aside from its awesome suspense): and I'm not really sure what Roger meant in his review. I admit I did find the note part a little odd, but it seemed like it was consistent with the ghost writer in that he wanted to get back at Ruth because she was so condescending to him earlier. It wasn't intended to be a note at first either; he was just writing it down for himself, and then decided to heal his wounded pride, with disastrous consequences.
Andrew,
The movie too long?! It was so cool throughout and I really liked how it wasn't making me all tensed up the way I was expecting it to like a lot of movies I saw recently ("Broken Embraces" and obviously "Inglourious Basterds"), and instead built up its suspense (as Roger said) one small insidious step at a time. It was refreshing, and the people in the movie were interesting.
*spoilers*
I wasn't interested in the McGregor character enough to care what happened to him, and I knew what was going to happen to him because the movie hints at it the whole way through. I know he's supposed to be shallow and it's supposed to be about a guy who thinks he's the star of a political thriller, but that kind of extra layer began to feel stagnant (and almost gimmicky) after the first hour or so when there wasn't much else at work to keep the movie afloat. I think if Polanski found a way to tell his story in a shorter amount of time (I can't offer how) the movie, and the humor, would've stood up a little better. As it stands, I liked it for some of the performances (but not McGregor's), the weirdness, and the odd joke here and there.
I think a much better version of the same kind of movie is Mamet's "Spanish Prisoner," which was exciting, mysterious and very witty in a self-referential sort of way (and the last shot is a hundred times cleverer, in my opinion).
Yeah, the Bushes (Senior and Jr. and gang) sold their souls to the Saudis more than any other politicians (the first Bush allowed Saddam Hussein to massacre hundreds of thousands of people who he called to rebel fight along side of us during the Gulf War). It's really something when you commit war crimes when we are not even at war (we "authorized the use of military force" to dispose of a dictator telling everyone we'd be greeted as liberators etc., which is not a declaration of war). This made the Saudis happy because it got Saddam out of their hair (and everyone else, since they are by far the #1 terrorist financiers), their biggest competitor's oil off the market (which rigs the price of oil up, making it a little easier for them), and they get to kill more Shiites themselves this time rather than letting Bush Sr. ring the dinner bell for Saddam Hussein to kill one of the Saudi's enemies, the Shiites, and also of course they get to kill American soldiers too. Colin Powell won't be saying anything about that because they gave him a Jaguar a week after he retired, which would have been illegal. Yea, it's a lot worse than just torture. We're talking the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, all of which have to be counted before Iraq can be a country.
I'm still not sure if R.P. imagined the viewer's jaw dropping at finding out a prime minister's wife was groomed for power by the CIA. It's not worth killing anybody over, maintaining such banal secrets is it? And the funniest part was when Ewan Googled what's his name for 13 seconds and cracked his whole cover. "Doi, I Googled it. He's CIA!"
The novel was a best-seller, but I don't know how it played out, either. To me, it was all about the visuals. Have you seen "Frantic"? It pokes fun at a lot of thriller conventions, too -- while also creating genuine tension and suspense. I know what you're saying, and I thought those things were silly too, but the filmmaking is so sleek I honestly didn't much care. I'm not a plot guy, anyway...
Yes I saw Frantic. I thought, in that case, that the violent attempts to acquire the hidden detonator were justified because, I guess, who wants a nuclear detonator in the "wrong hands"? Here, though, it seems bizarre (lacking "objective correlative") to hire a ghost writer, allow him (or both of them) to research, and then start trying to hush up (by means of murder) the results of that research when the truth is only a Google away. I also couldn't figure out whether the weird photo-shopped quality of the the photographs was intentional. With so much attention paid to aesthetics from start to finish, the goofy plot elements seemed to disrupt the maintenance of the viewer's submersion in that world. What would be the purpose (intention) of disrupting the viewer's engagement with the world on the screen?
In Paul Emmett's interview scene there was a horse statue behind and to the left of Tom Wilkinson. Later, when McGregor is fleeing from Emmett's thugs, before entering the ferry he hides behind a fishing company truck. Chinatown echoes? I bet they were.
**Spoiler**
The ending was absolutely dumb. And contrived. Who just starts walking down a busy street, when the sidewalk pylons would protect a person from being a hit and run victim like that? (The ghost writer deserves to die!) A different mode of death would still be left with being just dumb.
Why? For killing the protagonist/hero. Why do that? To be unique? Problem is it violates one of the biggest cardinal rules of Hollywood film making and there's a reason you rarely see it!!! The real reason for movies, as a product, that people pay good money for, is escapism. We all already know what the real world is like, put up with too much, and are mostly pretty fed up with it. For a couple of hours we get to just escape and forget. We don't want to see real-life troubles back up on the screen really. In real life the ghost writer would get killed for learning too much. We all know that. People want to see a 'Bourne' figure it out and extract justice, even if in real life it is far fetched. We all know 'Bourne' is improbable! But we love it anyway. If we can't get justice in real life, at least we can get it in a book or movie...
Don't know how the author handled it in the book. But Polanski screwed up the movie with a dumb ending!!!
Spoiler
The ending in the novel is much better. It was implied that he was died but vague (as it was said that he send the book to his former girlfriend to be published in case there's no news about him within 1 month or something happened to him). And The ghostwriter in the novel never informed anyone about Ruth being CIA agent (as far as didn't include his name in the memoir as collaborator but McAra name, so CIA would leave him alone).
SPOILER
What if the note that was passed to Ruth wasn't from the Ghost?
We see him toast at her and leave, but we don't see him pass the note, do we?
Also, we don't see him get hit by the car. It is implied, but we don't see it happen.
But I do think there was something planned for the Ghost to be at the party. He wasn't invited to the book release party (odd as he is the ghost writer) so Amelia invites him as her plus one. Coincidence?
What bothers me is that upon arriving at the conclusion regarding Ruth, the first thing I would have done is call or send that information to someone. He is already paranoid so he can't afford to wait and meet in person to reveal the truth.
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