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The Ghost (2010)

Time Out rating

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27 reviews

Synopsis

‘The Ghost’, adapted with novelist Robert Harris from his own thriller, stars Ewan McGregor as a writer whose life is put in jeopardy when he ghosts the memoirs of Pierce Brosnan’s Tony Blair-like British ex-PM

Movie review

From Time Out London

Roman Polanski’s last two films, ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘The Pianist’ were solemn affairs, which is unsurprising, considering their stories. But there’s often been a playful, comic side to his films, whatever their serious airs. Take a film like ‘Frantic’, his 1988 dash around Paris with a frazzled Harrison Ford and a wild Emmanuelle Seigner, and you can almost hear the giggles behind the Hitchcockian curtains. And 1992’s ‘Bitter Moon’ couldn’t have been more ridiculously teasing in its charting of relationships between men and women. Even 1976’s ‘The Tenant’, a spooky study in racial tension and mental disintegration, gave us Polanski wearing lipstick and a dress. There’s little more blackly comic than that.

The sniggers from the wings continue with ‘The Ghost’, an adaptation of Robert Harris’s bold and enjoyable novel that balances political reality with trashy fantasy and which was inspired by the former journalist’s disappointment with Tony Blair. In Harris’s hands, Blair becomes Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), a slick but empty former prime minister facing trial for war crimes and hiding from the public glare in the United States. The similarities between Blair and Lang are pointed – but the differences are enough that Harris and Polanski get away with placing familiar characters in a tight and tense plot more wild than the dreary reality of high politics. The dreariness is left to the weather.

Starting in a wet London, we watch as a green writer (Ewan McGregor, better than usual but struggling with an Estuary accent) is hired to finish Lang’s memoirs. The last chap died on the job, so there’s an ominous mood in the air as he travels to an isolated, modern beach house in a windswept Martha’s Vineyard and finds an air of deep discord. Lang’s wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams, styled with nods to Cherie Blair), is a quietly forceful but sad figure behind the scenes, while Lang’s relationship with his assistant (Kim Cattrall) is causing tension. When Lang flies to Washington to try to rescue his reputation, his ghost begins to uncover secrets which contradict the Langs’ version of their past and put him in increasing danger.

Unlike, say, ‘The Queen’, which delighted in the ordinariness of what goes on behind powerful doors, Harris and Polanski delight in pushing their story beyond the bounds of reality – but never so far that the the film has no relevance. While Brosnan’s rictus performance is to be grinned at, the fabric of the film is grey, heavy and steely, demanding that we share the ghost’s fear and take his peril seriously. As a thriller, the film is cold and lean, and the photography and design convey a strong sense of isolation and a world gone wrong. There are terrific scenes, not least one that involves a sat-nav guiding the action, and the film’s moody opening and closing scenes are as striking as the image Polanski creates of a weather-beaten coastline seen through the glass wall of Lang’s office.

There’s no escaping some laughable plot turns. Can you really unravel the CIA via Google? But the thread of black humour that runs throughout the film compensates for its occasional moments of madness. It’s a film just silly enough to be taken deadly seriously.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Time Out London Issue 2069 15-21 April, 2010

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User reviews of this film

miriam heyburn said...

Posted on Jan 30 2012 09:05 Agree with the photoshot pic of Emmerson. Am I wrong in thinking that the Cherie character was in fact a CIA agent attached to NWO, and that the PA was in fact his partner?
Several comments point to this, although I was so bored I can';t remember what they were.

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Bag of Angry Peas said...

Posted on Jan 30 2012 00:18 Simply a piece of ill-considered and poorly-executed, almost laughable trash. I purchased Harris' book for a quid and felt ripped-off. Within minutes of finishing I had forgotten the plot entirely and sometime later was saddened when I heard it was to be made into a movie. 'Maybe a screenwriter will be able to turn this into something good' I thought. Seeing it this evening on C4, I was further saddened to discover that they hadn't. There are uncanny similarities between the book and the film, the first of which is that they both represent (I quote) 'a cure for insomnia'. In the book the narrative is tedious, the dialogue limp and the characterisations as real, dynamic and exciting as an interesting accountant. Someone above compared the movie to a film student's work. Any student producing this is deserved of a 'D' followed by the red-penned footnote: 'Could do better.'
My advice is not to not watch it, but to try and block the existence of both book and film out of your mind forever.

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Peter Kellow said...

Posted on Sep 11 2011 10:02 Most of what has been written is true, except I found this film very enjoyable. Love the atmosphere of the desolate modern house, all the actors were good and Kim Cattral gorgeous. The plot moves along nicely and is enough to hang the incidental joys of this film on, viz: the flat grey light, the pace, the sense of the location. I have not enjoyed any Polanski film since Cul-de-sac, probably because he needs a touch of black humour to be Polanski. The music and pace are integrally part of the film much as a Claude Chabrol film. The aesthetic pleasures of this film make it one I can watch over and over again. If like me you find the second by second experience of the script far more important than plot you won't see the "faults". Enjoy.

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Nick said...

Posted on Jan 28 2011 17:25 Time Out just astoundingly wrong on this one. A couple of hours wasted.
A great idea for a film, but shockingly poor execution. What was perhaps meant to be a slow-burning build-up of tension was just ponderous, inept and hard to swallow. Poor script, lousy direction, no sign of an editor on the crew. Brosnan's mid-atlantic accent not a small detail for a British prime minister. Ewan's working class scribbler accent all over the place. Scottish would have worked...
A couple of flashes of competence in the staging of the final few minutes of the film, but really not worth waiting for. Really not.

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simon said...

Posted on Jan 03 2011 11:23 I'd like to think this is a comment blog about the film itself and not Roman Polanski's personal history. Sadly it seems some people cannot separate them. Having said that, I normally look forward to Rolanskis' films but was totally diasppointed with The Ghost, as was several other people. Everyones in it has a dodgy accent, the script is wooden and totally unnatural and the whole film feels fake and contrived. Maybe because of the Blair connection it adds a lot of weight to it that just isn't there for me. The most ridiculous part that had us holwling was the absolutley terrible photoshopped image of him at university with Tom Wilkinson. It looked like a child had done it with scissors and glue. Ridiculous.

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John Shields said...

Posted on May 15 2010 10:50 The only conspiracy worth talking about with regard to this conspiracy 'thriller' involves the generally good reviews that the film has received. To start with the positives. Great soundtrack, especially a bass rumbling that, though a little obvious, does a great job of racketing up the tension. In a theatre. The performance of McGregor also has a lot to commend it (compared to the others in the film) - he pulls off the Harrison Ford-like 'ordinary guy having one hell of day' with a few Grant-isms so you know he's a Brit. Without this performance, the film would certainly have fallen apart completely. Ok, so that's the semi-positives over. I'm going to ignore Bronsan, who was poor, but has such a minor part he's not really worth talking about. Instead, I'm going to launch myself at three different things: 1. Olivia Williams. If you have to play the crying crocodile role and play the liar in the early part of the film when everyone thinks your a victim on the good side, then there is one inveterate rule: you HAVE to act as if this weren't the case. You have to presume that the character is an excellent liar and trick the audience along with the other characters in the film. Taken at face value, her acting in the first part of the film was SO bad, that it was abundantly clear that she was acting badly on purpose. Bang goes the 'denouement'. Poor storytelling. 2. Despite an undoubted sense of tension at times, at others Polanski seems to have taken leave of his senses - protagonist killed off screen by a tragic deus ex machina with his key documentary evidence scattered to the wind on the street in front of the camera?!?! Come ON! This is not the 60s. We live in an age of sophisticated artistic cinematography. Some of this film is worthy of an A-level student. And not a good one. 3. Final (major) gripe - the storyline is just abysmal. The bad-guys are not developed enough for us to care; the CIA plot is too preposterous for the relatively ordinary circumstances of the rest of the film, and too complex for the kind of characterisation needed for a proper thriller - if you're going to have storylines like this, then hand the clipboard to Emmerich. The film also relies far too heavily on what the makers supposed to be the inherent interest of the Blair-Iraq story - misguided given the lack of a proper part given to Brosnan, and misguided given that, if the majority of people had any real interest in the goings on of the Blair government, British political history over the last decade would have been very different indeed. It's just not that interesting. Overall - poor, imbalanced, and rather dull.

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GoggleEyes said...

Posted on May 13 2010 12:24 The final scene of this film elicited a weary puff of laughter at how such an awful film can be so highly praised by so many.
Ewan McGregor and Kim Catrill are as wooden as Thunderbirds puppets, the story is just ludicrous and, as stated above, the facts being found out via Google (second search result no less) is about as lazy as one can get in terms of plot development.
Truly dire.

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wayne said...

Posted on May 11 2010 12:44 OMG some people have serious issues here. You need to learn to separte the man's art from his private life. Just becoz he abused a young gal doesnt mean the film is bad! get a life. Stunning movie.

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usman latif khawaja said...

Posted on May 05 2010 23:52 the same old conspiracy theory ,with borrowed frames from orson welles classics ,and a flagging narrative -only brosnan was watchable while ewan was a total washout and the ending was so silly i was unable to even laugh -and there was no need to get ewan into bed with olivia williams -but than ewan likes to strip in every movie -it is a habitual family tic -
polanski better fold up as days of -chinatown and tess are long over -even bitter moon is a classic compared to this mediocre scam on blair -bush blunders -i am sic of iraq war and movies as well and i hope so are others -can the blair ghost please be sent to hell and good riddance -amen

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bernard said...

Posted on May 03 2010 16:31 I still can't understand how you can write a positive review for a Pedophile. Will you do the same for a Gary Glitter come back gig? The sooner this dispicable man is in prison paying for what he did to an innocent young girl the better.

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Brian Petts Wood said...

Posted on May 02 2010 20:56 Thoroughly enjoyed this thriller- mood/photogrpahy/location/direction and most of the acting were spot on and made it a really worthwhile trip to the cinema. Would recommend

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Horatio said...

Posted on Apr 26 2010 22:46 I really enjoyed reading Harris' book - it was gripping and well above average throughout. However, the ending which was left to the final paragraph bordered on brilliance. I went to watch the film particularly keen to see how this aspect was handled and although the rest of the film was thoroughly entertaining, the ending was totally botched. I was surprised to learn on reading these reviews that the author collaborated on the scriptwriting which leaves me even more dissapointed. Those that have commented on the ending to the film are right - it was very poor particularly if you had read the book. I can't personally think how the "true" ending could have been handled on the screen but then I'm not a Polanski or a Harris.

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Tina said...

Posted on Apr 25 2010 21:53 Found this very disappointing - some of the acting, accents and scenes were pretty poor considering those involved but, worst, the plot was neither plausible nor engaging enough.

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DV said...

Posted on Apr 22 2010 08:12 Tense, humourous, Hitchcockian. More of them please! And KC is very sexy for her age... Tick, VG.

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Martha said...

Posted on Apr 21 2010 19:04 I wonder if you meant to post to another film, Lorraine? This one’s barely two hours long. I thought it wasn’t bad. Kim Catrall was on the radio talking about her role in this movie – I can’t think what she adds that another accomplished actress couldn’t. I appreciate she’s not supposed to be Miss Moneypenny, but ... Ewan McGregor’s accent isn’t as bad as several people have made out, and his acting's good. Olivia Williams seems to be the star of this movie – very good acting, though perhaps more swearing than was necessary for the emotions and circumstances being portrayed. I loved the scenery, and the house in which it was mainly shot.

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