[rating=3]
Adam Lang, the former British Prime Minister, shambles around under virtual house arrest in his publisher’s post-modern mansion. It’s like a bunker concreted into a Hitchcockian Island -windswept vistas promise freedom, but in reality act as a stark reminder of Lang’s bitter exile from his own country. His wife Ruth likens their banishment to Napoleon’s on St. Helena, with the tyrant of Europe dumbfounded how anyone could see his rule as anything other than benign.
Under attack from members of his former cabinet, haunted by the mysterious “suicide” of his ghostwriter and wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, Lang is a brooding and increasingly irrational Macbeth stalking the grounds of Dunsinane Castle. The media, peace protestors and an invisible terrorist threat lay siege to the compound as revelations that Pierce Brosnan’s Lang ordered the kidnap and torture of four Al-Qaeda suspects threaten to drain the permatan from his movie star cheeks.
Into this maelstrom breezes a second ghost to tackle the faltering $10 million memoirs of Lang. Bowie-voiced, sardonic, and armed with a healthy dose of Eric Morecombe wit – “all the words are there, they’re just in the wrong order” – he’s a talented nobody employed to get the job done in a month, a literary mercenary hoping to carry out a character assassination for the gangster-like John Maddox, CEO of the publishing firm.
Yet not even the ghost’s aloof sense of detachment can save him from becoming embroiled in power battle between Lang’s duo of Lady Macbeths: his wife and his assistant/mistress Amelia Bly. Like Goering and Himmler fighting over the ashes of the Third Reich while the Red Army closes in, the pair struggle to control Lang’s ever diminishing political legacy.
As the ghost unravels Lang’s early life from the dreary prose already penned by his predecessor, he finds himself spiralling into unfamiliar territory as he develops a conscience and perhaps even an identity of his own. “Eventually they’ll discover who you are and that will be horrible for you,” Ruth warns him about the media. Or is she predicting a fate more sinister as the shadowy pawns of corruption start to reveal their insidious reach?
We know that Lang is a wafer thinly veiled take on Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, but “The Ghost” plays infinitely better if you see Lang as director Robert Polanski himself. Polanski would never admit it, he’s often vehemently denied that anything of his own life has ever made it into his films, but the director doth protest too much. Hunkered down under house arrest, attempting to evade American courts and a baying media, Polanski is in denial about his true place in history, much like Blair/Lang is.
“The Ghost” is still a superior political thriller in the hands of one of the last old masters of cinema, but it shows his fading genius, as opposed to, say, Eastwood’s unnerving capacity to improve as a filmmaker in his twilight years. Snatched conversations behind glass are like “Rosemary’s Baby,” and the ghost filling a dead man’s shoes transports us back to “The Tennant,” plus the final scene is pure unadulterated Polanski. One must now wonder, though, if this is the final hurrah of the most defiant and disturbed of directors.