Review: The Ghost

After all the controversial allocations made about Roman Polanski over the last six months its easy to forget that he is at heart a film-maker. After making a version of Oliver Twist for some reason, Polanski is back at his storytelling best with a big screen version of Robet Harris' novel The Ghost. The plot sees Ewan McGregor's ghost writer hired to finish ghosting the memoirs of former prime minister Adam Lang after the previous ghost, and aide to Lang, died in mysterious circumstances. Meanwhile Lang has been accused of war crimes and McGregor starts to dig up clues that point to a secret past and may have been the reason that the former ghost writer perished. McGregor also starts to attract the attentions of Lang's neglected wife Ruth.

All the action takes place on a small island off Boston in which Lang has a reclusive property, and the island starts to take a characteristic of its own. Polanski is able to make the island central to the storytelling, the sea where the former ghost perished is forboding and the small houses and the scared villagers make it even more creepy. The score also plays a part in ramping up the tension and does it well. For what is essentially a noirish thriller, The Ghost is incredibly funny so when those shock moments come sometimes you are not really prepared for them. Although all the scenes do advance the plot in some way, I found some of them incredibly talky especially those involving The Ghost and Ruth Lang. I also found the final third of the film lacked a certain something and I felt the film lacked the adequate pay-off that had been set-up in the first two thirds of the film.

Ewan McGregor is great in the lead role, his London accent does falter at times but he does well portraying the outsider who doesn't really care about politics and just wants to get paid but gets sucked into the action once he gets to the island. Olivia Williams is actually used well in a film for once, as Ruth she flicks from ice cold to fairly warm and normal and at times incredibly sexy. Meanwhile despite being British, Kim Catrall struggles with a plummy accent there are also some good minor roles for Tom Wilkinson and Eli Wallach. However the big surprise is that Pierce Brosnan isnt' in that much. I got the impression that his character would have almost as much screen time as McGregor, but instead he spends a lot of the time away from where the action is. When he is on screen, however, he is a joy to watch as the sickly over-the-top former P.M.

Overall a well-crafted and carefully put together film from one of the best directors of all time which has some fine acting and cinematography but struggles to maintain its plot flow in the final act.