"The Ghost Writer': Polanski's revenge

You'd think they'd cut someone who survived both the Holocaust and Charles Manson a break. But the Los Angeles judge who pursued Roman Polanski on a 30-year-old charge of statutory rape was made of sterner stuff.

Never mind that the case was procedurally flawed, or that the girl in question, now a matron in her 40s, pronounced forgiveness and asked for mercy on Polanski's behalf. The Puritans made America, and it still belongs to them. And, in Los Angeles, there's no sterner moral duty than grabbing a headline.

Polanski's new film, The Ghost Writer, is his act of vengeance against the country that, at least by his lights, forced him into exile and now wants him back as a prisoner. I don't make light of the crime of which he was accused, or of his flight from its consequences. I will say, though, that it's the stuff of a Polanski movie, although doubtless one he'll never make. The present one must stand for his statement on the subject instead.

On the surface, The Ghost Writer is a dark political thriller. Ewan MacGregor, the eponymous (and otherwise unnamed) ghost writer of the title, is hired to do a quickie remake on the memoir of a recently retired British prime minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), who's holed up in a mysteriously bunkered estate on Martha's Vineyard. Lang is an obvious stand-in for Tony Blair, who has been defending his conduct in the Iraq War before a board of inquiry recently (fancy such a thing happening here!).

Man in the middle

Lang, unlike Blair so far, suddenly finds himself indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for assisting the CIA's rendition "program." MacGregor's ghost writer lands smack in the midst of this brouhaha, as well as between Lang's restless wife (Olivia Williams) and Lang's secretary-cum-mistress (Kim Cattrall, of "Sex and the City" fame). More alarmingly, MacGregor discovers that the predecessor he's been hired to replace was murdered, and that Lang has a sinister tie to a Yale academic (Tom Wilkinson, in a steely, pitch-perfect performance) with CIA connections.

This puts our ghost writer in well over his head. There's often an innocent in Polanski's films who serves as the narrative pole around which deception and evil swirl. Our hero's best bet is clearly to finish his job and get out as quickly as possible, but he soon finds himself knowing far more than is good for him— and, worse, tempted to act on his knowledge. This plot device is vintage Hitchcock, but Polanski is less kind to his protagonists: Innocence, for him, is always a sin to be punished.

Stretching naiveté

The film doesn't seem slow, but it unfolds at a leisurely pace, with no concession to the harum-scarum tactics of most present-day thrillers. Polanski knows that most action takes place on the faces of his characters— a trait he shares with Bergman— and he lets his camera rest there in carefully composed shots, although there's the requisite amount of hot pursuit as well.

It's only at the end that credibility lapses, as our hero believes he has cracked the dark secret of Lang's memoir and determines to expose it. Naiveté can only go so far, even in film.

The "Martha's Vineyard" of the film is actually Germany's Baltic coast, since Polanski himself of course cannot return to America except as a prisoner. Lang finds himself in the reverse position, because America is one of the few countries that don't recognize the Hague court.

His sanctuary is unsafe, however, because he's rapidly becoming a liability to his hosts. What that means is clear enough from the fate of former American puppets who've lost value to their masters: Rafael Trujillo, Ngo Dinh Diem, Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein.

A dubious argument

Such despots, of course, are disposable assets. But a British prime minister? When the ghost writer expresses skepticism that the CIA could simply have run the democratically elected leader of a major world nation, Lang's former foreign minister (who, needless to say, may well be an asset himself) points to Lang's tenure (like Blair's, a decade), and asks rhetorically when Lang had ever taken a position contrary to American interests.

This argument isn't wholly persuasive. Since Dwight Eisenhower threatened to sink the British pound after Sir Anthony Eden blindsided him by joining France and Israel in attempting to recapture the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, no British prime minister has ever taken a single step independent of Washington. With a patsy reliably ensconced in Downing Street— even Margaret Thatcher, though she sometimes led her dance partner, never pushed Ronald Reagan in any direction he didn't want to go— why would anyone have needed a plant? An Alan Lang would have been superfluous to American requirements; a Tony Blair was quite sufficient.

Still, there is value to Polanski's perspective. We are accustomed to viewing our skullduggery in the world— black ops, torture hells, political assassinations— through the prism of our self-righteousness and our God-given right to security. Certainly our own political thrillers ratify this perspective. Polanski, once himself a Hollywood director (Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown), gives us a view of ourselves as the rest of the world sees us: not as the defender of global peace, but, as international polls have repeatedly shown, the greatest threat to it. True, Polanski has a personal axe to grind, and he's not very kindly disposed toward the Brits either. Nor is The Ghost Writer his best film, cannily acted and directed as it is. But the mirror he holds up to us is one we ignore at our peril.