On the Big Screen: THE GHOST WRITER (2010)

When a woman hands a man the confidential manuscript of a memoir and tells him he has a limited time to read it, I don't need to see the white pages turn into a snowy landscape to know that the spirit of Orson Welles is in the room. Roman Polanski's new film is Wellesian in theme if not in style or structure. If it hints at Citizen Kane at some points, it points to Mr. Arkadin in others. One can only imagine what Welles might make of the situation Polanski has adapted from Robert Harris's novel, in collaboration with the author. The title character is an unnamed writer (Ewan McGregor) hired to polish the memoir of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) after the politician's original collaborator dies. The previous ghost writer got separated from his car and the ferry that bore it under circumstances that grow increasingly suspicious, while the pressure on the present ghost to finish the book grows more urgent as his subject faces an International Criminal Court indictment for war crimes. Adam Lang (meant as a stand-in for Tony Blair, though Brosnan attempts no imitation) is accused of placing four alleged terrorists into the hands of CIA torturers. Is there a connection between his legal jeopardy and the death of his previous ghost writer? Does the project put the present writer in jeopardy? It wouldn't be much of a thriller otherwise.

McGregor's character is a kind of doppelganger for Lang and may be set up to die for Lang's sins if he isn't careful. As he comes to question the official version of his predecessor's demise, he stumbles across some supplemental research the first writer had undertaken on Lang's rise to power. As he traces the first ghost's fatal steps, the new ghost puts himself in danger of ending up in the same place, setting up some nicely handled set pieces of pursuit and escape. Meanwhile, he finds himself in a potentially dangerous relationship with Lang's wife (Olivia Williams), who's jealous of hubby's closeness with his chief assistant (Kim Cattrall). All of this is handled very well by the sure-handed director. The film betrays nothing of the constrained circumstances of its final assembly, Polanski having edited it in jail while extradition to America for an extended stay seemed likely. The acting is good all around, possibly excepting Brosnan. He doesn't strike me as the sort of wonky politician I expected Blair or a fictional counterpart to be, but in his defense the movie politician is supposed to be less than meets the eye; that's part of the plot. Polanski gets the most from limited use of such American character actors as Timothy Hutton, Jim Belushi and the mighty Eli Wallach. Someday, at the end of the world, Wallach and Ernest Borgnine will face each other as the last men standing, and while Wallach looks a little frail here I wouldn't count him out.

The Ghost Writer is an effective, entertaining film that I readily recommend, but it left me wondering whether the conspiracy thriller genre is going obsolete. Thrillers of this kind work by withholding and gradually revealing information in a process that doesn't seem realistic in the current information age. Without spoiling anything, let me note that The Ghost Writer saves a major piece of circumstantial evidence for its final revelation. That revelation is meant to have you suddenly think differently about a major character. In retrospect, however, you sense that the writers had manipulated you into an artificial presumption of innocence. Given the internet research our hero undertakes to discover the sinister ties linking other characters, it seems unlikely, given that final revelation of a detail that seems to have been public knowledge, that the ghost would not have stumbled onto something online that at least suggested the association that so floors him later. When you consider that one tidbit he learns from a single website is accepted by an important person as decisive proof of a monstrous, decades-long conspiracy to manipulate British politics, his failure to find anything to warn him of a more dangerous truth seems even more unlikely. Movies are simply falling behind the ability of the conspiratorial imagination to draw inferences. As a result, it was in its final minutes when The Ghost Writer suddenly seemed most old fashioned -- and its extra revelation of a hokey secret code didn't help. But overall, Polanski's film is old-fashioned in good ways, and many people may not feel the same way about the ending as I did. Maybe I'm just too conspiracy-minded -- but that's just what they'd like you to believe....

REPULSION (1965)

Despite the international success of his film Knife in the Water, Roman Polanski had trouble getting financing for his first English-language film. He ended up securing backing from Compton, a company that distributed and exhibited soft-core sex movies. That's not really inappropriate, since Repulsion occasionally reminds me of the the "roughies" that were being made at the same time. Catherine Deneuve never quite loses her clothes, and definitely doesn't reveal anything scandalous, but the atmosphere of borderline madness and her night terrors of rape make the film a kind of art-house/roughie hybrid that wouldn't be out of place on one of those good old Something Weird double feature DVDs.

Polanski makes Deneuve a portrait of profound alienation, someone who can never feel at home in her own home, which she shares with a roommate and sometimes uncomfortably with the roommate's boyfriend. Her character, seems never to have advanced beyond that childhood stage when every inanimate object around her seems capable of coming to malevolent life in the middle of the night. Deneuve was at the beginning of a career that to the present day defines glamour evolving with age, but she earns her cred as an actress by going through the wringer. Her beauty is irrepressible, but her character is someone who ceases to care about appearances as she succumbs to hallucinatory paranoia. Her big head of Sixties hair becomes a hag's mop as her face becomes a gaping mask of cognitive dissonance. She goes quite convincingly mad, at the cost of two men's lives.

Part of the wicked quality of Repulsion is that it gets you questioning whether our heroine has killed anyone or has just fantasized or hallucinated the visitors she's killed. She hallucinates enough stuff, like giant cracks forming on the apartment walls, to make anything that happens to her inside mysterious. The point, after all, is that she's lost her power to distinguish between reality and the imagery spilling from her brain. As we wait for her roommate to return, suspense builds about exactly what the poor woman will find.

In a way, too, Repulsion is a kind of joke -- a joke on cinema itself. The key to the joke, I'll suggest, is the scene just after Deneuve, playing a manicurist, has nearly taken a client's fingernail off in her distracted state. A co-worker suggests that going to a movie might take her mind off her troubles. Without naming the film, she describes highlights from The Gold Rush, particularly the starvation sequences in which Chaplin treats his boot as a multi-course meal and Mack Swain mistakes Chaplin for a giant chicken. She cracks Deneuve up describing the comedy and even throws in a Chaplin walk for illustration. It's a welcome bit of mood-lightening until you realize: Damn, that's kind of like -- more like just like what Deneuve is going through with her hallucinations. In her apartment, she's surrounded by sight gags. Her predicament has often been the stuff of comedy through movie history, and now Polanski subtly suggests that those movies are mirrors of genuine madness. In Repulsion he follows the logic of the joke to its gruesome conclusion.

Over at Goodfella's Movie Blog, Dave named Repulsion his favorite film of 1965, and you can see the film from another angle in his review of it. I was tempted to buy the thing during the Barnes & Noble Criterion sale earlier this summer, but also anticipated the Albany Public Library acquiring it, since it was an English-language Criterion title. It took a while, but the Library came through in its most recent burst of art-house acquisitions, and I can now say that Dave's is an understandable choice. I have an eclectic taste in Polanski, Frantic and Bitter Moon being among my favorites from him, but I don't think Polanski fans will question my adding Repulsion to that list. For the rest of you, I simply recommend the film.

This copy of the British trailer was uploaded by CaledoniaUberAlles: