The Meddler #3: Some problems with The Ghost Writer...

The Ghost Writer was a pretty-good conspiracy thriller that came out last year, directed by Roman Polanski. (I’ve never mentioned Polanski on this blog, partially for fear of the flame-wars that his name tends to ignite on the internet in recent years. Let’s try to avoid those, pretty-please, and focus on the work. I promise you that lots of the directors I’ve written about have done things that nobody would approve of.) The movie got very mixed reactions, with some critics putting it on their top ten lists and some others quickly dismissing it.

Pierce Brosnan plays a very Tony Blair-like figure: a recently retired prime minister of England who left office facing serious human rights charges after he acquiesced to a U.S.-led war and possibly participated in illegal renditions. He’s now holed up in a beach house on Martha’s Vineyard, writing his memoirs, and avoiding attention from the Hague. When his first ghost-writer dies under mysterious circumstances, the word goes out to find another…

This is where our story actually begins: Ewan McGregor is a professional ghost writer who doesn’t care about politics, but gets bullied into the taking the job by his pushy agent. He agrees to live at the beach house and try to get the ex-PM to tell a more interesting version of his life story in the one month leading up to the pub date. Brosnan turns out to be brittle and uncommunicative. McGregor finds notes from the previous ghost-writer hidden in his room implying that he had found damning evidence about Brosnan and was killed in retaliation. McGregor decides to pick up the investigation where the previous writer left off. He uncovers Brosnan’s big secret: he was secretly recruited into the CIA in college and has served them ever since! McGregor tries to prove this, but Brosnan is killed by a peace activist and McGregor is targeted by more shadowy forces…

Here were my problems with movie, focusing on the first act:

1. The movie has a fun scene early on where McGregor cleverly gets the job by pointing out that the fact he doesn’t care about politics either way makes him the ideal ghost writer. That may be true, but the problem is that it makes him a terrible choice to be the protagonist of this movie. We keep being told that Brosnan has betrayed his country to the Americans, but we don’t feel it because none of the characters who we spend any time with actually feels this way themselves. Obviously Brosnan and his entourage don’t, so that leaves McGregor, who remains blandly apolitical. You can’t just tell us to feel betrayed. You have to show us characters who feel that way.
   
2. But beyond that, McGregor just has an infuriating lack of drive or ambition. He doesn’t want to ghost-write the book, but he doesn’t have anything he’d rather do more. He never expresses any hopes or dreams… he’s not even frustrated, just petulant and bored. As he travels to the island, we get shot after shot after shot of him sleeping on every leg of the trip. This, my friends, may be the most passive protagonist in movie history!
   
3. Let us count the motivation holes: McGregor’s resistance towards ghost-writing the book is unmotivated (he just ghost-wrote the memoir of a stage magician without complaint). His decision to write it anyway is unmotivated (He never worries about money). His decision to investigate the CIA connection is unmotivated (McGregor accidentally stumbles upon the previous ghost writer’s investigation and half-heartedly pursues it). He has no real goal when he confronts the final villain... Okay, now I’ve lost count…
4. Brosnan is one of our most underrated actors and he does a great job with what he’s given, but the role is underwritten. Modern politicians have a suspicious amount of traits in common with psychopaths: when you’re in the room with one, they can electrify you and look deep into your eyes, making you feel more important than you ever have before—but only as long as you help them get whatever they want. Brosnan always has charm to spare, and he could have pulled this off well, but we don’t get any sense here of the skills this guy had before he bitterly decided that the world had betrayed him.
   

Okay, that’s just Act 1, and I’ll mostly keep my focus there, but there are still other problems afterwards: What will be the consequences if McGregor reveals any of this information? The world already hates Brosnan, right? In fact, he gets assassinated based on information that’s already out there, so how much more harm could additional posthumous accusations do, especially if they only confirm Bosnan’s image as America’s toady? Who would be endangered, other than the whistleblowers themselves? What are the stakes? If I have time left over tomorrow, I’ll touch on solutions to those problems too…