By David Ross. Defenders of Roman Polanski say in effect, “Great artists give the world so much that they deserve the right to engage in a bit of pedophilic sodomy.” The Ghost Writer (2010) should discomfit this chorus. You can argue that great artists should stand above the law, but you can’t argue that Polanski is anything like a great artist these days. With The Ghost Writer, the elderly roué sinks into the second childhood of incompetent left-wing conspiracy mongering and leaves you wondering whether you’ve overestimated him all along. How bad is The Ghost Writer? I remember once wandering into my dad’s kitchen and taking a big swig of milk from the carton and my mouth filling with rancid cottage cheese. The Ghost Writer is the filmic equivalent.
The plot – something like the Manchurian Candidate in reverse – is a snitty little exercise in historical distortion (I won’t bother with the usual spoiler warning because there’s nothing to spoil). Ewan McGregor plays a ghostwriter hired to help a recently retired British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) write his memoirs. While investigating the mysterious demise of his predecessor, McGregor discovers that the prime minister’s wife is – what else – a CIA mole. This explains the brainless and biddable prime minister’s otherwise incomprehensible support for America’s War on Terror. In the end, the prime minister is assassinated by the forgivably deranged father of a British soldier killed in Iraq, and McGregor is murdered by the CIA before he can breathe a word of his secret (I hadn’t noticed that the CIA was this competent – well done, men, keep up the good work). So we now have a Tony Blair assassination fantasy to complement Hollywood’s bevy of Bush assassination fantasies (see here). Just in case we somehow miss the analogy to the Bush-Blair axis of evil, Polanski throws in a Condi-esque secretary of state, a Cheney-esque vice president, and a confused sub-conspiracy that links the CIA to a Halliburton-like defense contractor (it’s called Heatherton or something).
Polanski’s demonization of the the CIA is leaden and mechanical and ultimately unwatchable; the entire film has the air of the liar sullenly brazening out his lie. Give guys like Michael Moore and Markos Moulitsas some credit – they at least bring a zany bounce to their programmatic misunderstanding of the world. Polanski does not even bother to make his film superficially credible. Why does his retired PM live in a concrete bunker on a remote island off the coast of what – Maine? I hadn’t noticed that the graying lions of European politics make a beeline for Yankee fishing villages, nor have I noticed much Brutalist domestic architecture round Bar Harbor way. I suppose Polanski filmed these scenes in Sweden or Norway, having no clue and not caring what New England actually looks like. And, of course, it takes McGregor only twenty-four hours to unravel a CIA conspiracy at the heart of the Atlantic alliance that the anti-American world media has somehow missed over the previous twenty-five years. How does he do it? Google! By gum, that’s clever. Why didn’t someone else think of that?
There is a weird autobiographical subtext to the movie, by the way. The Blairish PM can’t return to Europe because he’s been indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. Polanski, of course, can’t return to America, having helped himself to a drugged thirteen year old. The Ghost Writer is Polanski’s fantasy of a world in which celebrity pedophiles can cross borders and neocons – the real bad guys – can’t. In my own opinion, the International Criminal Court should bring charges against directors who invent listless alternate realities vaguely meant to confuse and propagandize. For punishment, they might be set down in the desert with only their broken moral compasses to guide them back to civilization.
For more CIA derangement syndrome see here.
Posted on October 17th, 2010 at 10:06am.
I know! It could be a double feature with RED at the local dollar theatre.
With the exception of Chinatown, Pedofileski is probably one of the most overrated Directors working today. The Pianist with Adrien Brody is nothing more than a glorified gratuitous movie of the week. This doesn’t surprise me in the least. I would not have gone to this movie anyways and now I’ll avoid it with glee.
I got corralled into watching this. Simply put, it sucks. Nothing about it was logical and based on my visits to New England, I can safely say the sun comes out every now and then. The way McGregor figured out the ex-Mrs. Prime Minister was a CIA agent would embarrass the guy who wrote the “Encyclopedia Brown” books. The worst thing about it was its obnoxious self-righteous tone about international law. In Polanski’s world, keeping innocent people safe from terrorism is a horrible crime yet there’s nothing wrong butt raping a middle schooler and running from the law if enough douchebags think you’re a “great artist.”
Man, I see CIA derangement syndrome everwhere I look these days. I suppose the waterboarding fiasco gave these creative types all the excuse they needed to avoid depicting AQ and the Taliban as the villain in any movie or TV show. In addition to this movie and ‘Red’, we also had ‘The Expendables’ and ‘The A-Team’ mining that same vein. I don’t know if any Libertas reader still watches it, but once upon a time, the NCIS was pro-military and pro-America. No longer. Its latest ep had the CIA funding Afghan drug- and warlords as its raison d’etre for being in Afghanistan. And two episodes prior, the big bad was a former member of a Reagan Cold War death squad who got his conscience back and, understandably, sought out and killed his former team members.
The sole exception to all this ugliness, insofar as movies I’ve seen this year, was ‘To Paris with Love’, directed by Pierre Morel (Taken). This movie displayed impressive moral clarity for these dark times – John Travolta’s CIA field operative is a badass jihadist hunter-killer who never steps wrong and its finale made my jaw drop. Sure, cineastes will pooh-pooh the film as being irredeemably neanderthal but I loved it to bits. It washes the taste of CIA-derangement movies right out.
Hey VW, Great to hear about TO PARIS WITH LOVE.
Got it coming from NETFLIX and plan to stop my cave wall painting to check it out when it arrives.