Review by A.A. Dowd: Call it coincidence or just great minds thinking alike, but the new Roman Polanski film, his first since 2005’s “Oliver Twist,” begins exactly like the new one from Martin Scorsese: with an ominous, straight-on shot of a ferry pulling into port. The serendipitous similarities don’t end there. Like “Shutter Island,” Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer” is a pulpy detective yarn set on a rainy, secluded island off the coast of Massachusetts. Both films are based on best-selling page-turners. Both filmmakers have been accused of slumming, which is a backhanded (RE: snobbish) acknowledgement that neither of them talk down to genre. And both final products speak to the potential in pure hokum for giddy gamesmanship and throwback thrills. (Check those dueling suspense scores and swooping, Hitchcock-worthy camera moves.) Yet lest one make too much of such auteuristic déjà vu, know that Scorsese and Polanski—the latter of whom inched out the former in a close Oscar race a few years ago—are dabbling in slightly different pedigrees here. Whereas “Shutter Island” suffers modestly from the transparent contrivance of its trash-lit source material, the worst thing you can say about “The Ghost Writer” is that it is, at its core, Grisham-grade claptrap. Its success or failure hinges less on destination and more on the scenic route the filmmaker takes to get there—form supersedes content, style trumps substance, and a gifted craftsman runs mad circles around an exceedingly familiar story arc.

If Polanski is slumming, the plucky hero of his latest—a once-serious novelist who got roped into the big business of celebrity tell-alls—is selling out in style. “I’m the Ghost,” Ewan McGregor’s hack-for-hire announces, moments after arriving at his spooky, oceanfront writer’s retreat. That moniker echoes with dual meaning. The wordsmith’s been commissioned to punch up the memoirs of recently retired Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), a political figure mired in controversy and dodging war crime allegations. But McGregor’s also filling a dead man’s shoes—it’s the body of his predecessor that washes up to shore in the film’s evocative opening moments. The tabloids screamed suicide, but what really happened to him? Did he get too close to his subject, uncover too much dirty laundry? Was Lang’s one-time radical wife (a perfectly cast Olivia Williams) somehow involved? Could there be coded clues in the man’s unfinished manuscript? Our Ghost, like many of cinema’s greatest gumshoes, stumbles into this mystery by accident and sheer, itchy curiosity. And if you can’t beat him to the Big Reveal, I have a few dozen political thrillers and hoary whodunits for you to “investigate.” (I’m guessing, also, that you aren’t overly familiar with Roger Ebert’s Law of Economy of Characters.)

Robert Harris wrote “The Ghost,” the 2007 novel he co-adapts here, as a thinly-veiled conspiracy theory about Tony Blair’s links to the Bush administration. The details of that fictionalized exposé are faithfully preserved (the faint scent of rhetorical outrage permeates the thing) but the paranoia is pure Polanski. McGregor, investing his underwritten scribe-turned-snoop with a measure of off-kilter charisma, is one of Roman’s famously frazzled frontmen—gone stir crazy in isolation, left to his own wandering imagination and inquisitive devices. As he catches his first hints of foul play, the Ghost begins to retrace the steps of his predecessor, while Polanski reconfigures noir conventions for a post-digital age. Google becomes a detective’s tool, a buzzing cell phone becomes a harbinger of danger, and, in one shuddery-good plot development, GPS tracking becomes an investigative time machine. The film’s setting is at once vaguely foreboding and impossibly banal—it’s like Bergman’s Fårö Island standing in for Martha’s Vineyard—and the director populates it with faces both fresh and familiar, with once and future character actors making big impressions in small roles. (The supporting cast includes Kim Cattrall, Timothy Hutton, Eli Wallach, and, in a casually menacing cameo, the great Tom Wilkinson.)

A light-on-its-feet exercise carved out of deadly serious source material, “The Ghost Writer” puts off plot about as long as it can, treating the political imperative that fueled Harris’s text as something of an afterthought. Though it’s tempting to see a bit of the now-imprisoned filmmaker in Brosnan’s ambiguous Lang—a vilified public figure, dodging trial and languishing in exile—Polanski scarcely seems invested in any of the conflicts contained within his tidy narrative. He’s too busy getting back into his funny-suspenseful genre groove. Quite a bit of oddball humor leavens the cynicism of Harris’s worldview, be it the rat-a-tat rapport between McGregor and his bickering employers, or the one-off sight gag of a servant haplessly attempting to rake leaves on an impossibly windy afternoon. There are shades, too, of the director’s seminal “Chinatown” throughout: the discovery of a drowned body, the nighttime scramble over a fence, and a truly remarkable last shot that contains, within its immaculate frame lines, a subtler but no less damning indictment of unchecked corruption. (Okay, so that political imperative isn’t a complete afterthought.) It’s in the third-act tying up of loose ends that “The Ghost Writer” ultimately bests the superficially similar “Shutter Island.” Both films involve a terrible truth uncovered via the rearranging of letters, but where Scorsese ends his pop-lit adaptation with 20 minutes of ungainly exposition, Polanski turns the passing of a scrap of paper between hands into a set-piece as exciting as anything in “The Hurt Locker.” Forget it Marty, it’s entertainment.

Last Word: If this proves Polanski’s swan song (God forbid!), at least it’ll stand as a potent reminder of the ways a great filmmaker can make more from less, transcending mediocre material with the precision of his craft.

Review By:
A.A. Dowd

IN REVIEW ONLINE