A vibrant, humane, nerve-jangling political thriller, The Ghost Writer, for which Roman Polanski richly deserved the best director prize he won at Berlin, is based on the novel The Ghost by Robert Harris, to whom, along with Polanski, the superlative script is credited. I know, I know: One cannot call this art; rather, it is artful entertainment—but what brilliant entertainment. Suspense doesn’t pop up here and there; it is sustained, and its cumulative effect, before a heartbreaking finish, is to give the viewer cardiac arrest. Without manipulative fast cuts or glib gore.
Pierce Brosnan, in the performance of a lifetime, plays a vapid, always cheerful-for-the-camera, but thoroughly rotting former British prime minister, Adam Lang, whose memoir, still in need of redaction, seems to have cost the life of the ghost writer his publisher assigned to the project. Lang and his wife, an also biblically named Ruth, live now on a U.S. island, where the new “ghost,” who is utterly anonymous except for the designation “Ghost,” joins them to bring in the manuscript in publishable form in a few weeks. The point is made that Ghost has no children, indeed, no family connections of any kind. We may say, I think, that Ghost does not exist, that no publisher would in the midst of such a violent outcome as drowning (officially suicide, likely murder) replace his predecessor so close to the finish line; but what does that mean? Our nameless protagonist, who ends up investigating Lang, is really showing us what isn’t being investigated; what Ghost patiently brings to light is what will never come to light. We get to see what a sordid mess exists behind an ex-politician’s Pepsodent smile.
There is indeed much to investigate. How did Lang, with no early interest in politics, get to where he did? What role did Ruth play in his political ascension, and who or what was behind her? And what of these charges that the World Court has begun to investigate, that Lang was involved in the kidnapping and torture of presumed Arab terrorists? The eye sees much, but so little compared to all that is in play.
Normally one of my least favorite actors, Ewan McGregor charmingly plays Ghost; nothing is what he should always play.
Lang is, of course, based on phony Tony Blair, who sold his soul to hitch his historical wagon to a vicious, stupidly vengeful U.S. president’s star in invading and occupying Iraq. Now every citizen of the United Kingdom must bear the shame and disgrace of Blair’s endless inability to shake his shadow loose from the substance that is itself a shadow of the Cheney-war profiteer Halliburton connection.
This is one political thriller that counts.
Polanski seamlessly incorporates a lot of Hitchcock, perhaps to underscore the Anglo-American connection (giving the only bad performance in the film, Eli Wallach eerily resembles someone whom the second Lady de Winter interviews in Rebecca, 1940), but the film is his: breathtakingly, beautifully his. The final shot, perhaps the most brilliant shot he ever devised, with pages of manuscript flying into frame on a dark city street, plays off Apu’s release of his long worked-on manuscript from a hill-top in Satyajit Ray’s fifty years-earlier The World of Apu. There, the manuscript is autobiographical; here, it isn’t Ghost’s life because, non-existent, Ghost doesn’t have a life. There, letting the thing go helps Apu reunite with his son; here, it merely punctuates for the literally minded that Ghost is dead, having never been alive in the first place.
Polanski has done it. Mature, calm, extraordinarily observant, this film never collapses into paranoia, while providing considerable evidence for our being suspicious, and not once shows a jot of cynicism. Polanski is in a good place; he leaves the cynicism to us.
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WHITE LIGHT/BLACK RAIN (Steven Okazaki, 2007)
March 20, 2010“My God, what have we done?” — Capt. Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, from which Hiroshima was atom-bombed
The quiet, meditative calm of the compact Emmy-winning documentary White Light/Black Rain comes from maturity. A survey of the havoc wreaked on humanity by the U.S. atomic bombings of Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, including black-and-white archival material and color in-camera interviews of survivors, most of whom were children at the time, the film was directed by Steven Okazaki, a U.S.-born gentleman in his mid-fifties. Okazaki is patient, humane; nowhere is he snarling off-camera.
This is what I know, because it happened during my lifetime: President Harry S. Truman, who ordered the atomic bombings, insisting these would save American lives by ending the Second World War that much sooner, repeatedly said afterwards that he did not regret these presidential decisions of his. As soon as he died, one day after Christmas in 1972, his personal papers revealed the truth: Truman was forever haunted by, and regretted, what he had done. Okazaki’s film, which every U.S. teenager and adult should see, shows some of the effects of what was done when one nation, under Godlessness, deliberately attacked massive numbers of civilians with the worst weaponry the world thus far had.
We now know that this murderous mischief wasn’t even necessary for ending the war. Had it been, it still would not have been the thing to do. The ends do not justify the means. Those aging white men who in the course of Okazaki’s film swear allegiance to the justice of bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have forfeited all place in the annals of the human race—unless, like Truman, they are hiding the truth of their feelings, perhaps even from themselves.
U.S. Americans can get grotesquely funny on this score. During what is called in my country the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October 1962, the confrontation between the Soviet Union, which had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba to warn off U.S. aggression, led to their removal. The “spin” the American press and subsequent writers gave this is that Russia “blinked” first and President Kennedy proved himself a hero! The whole thing made sense to legions of Americans as a schoolyard quarrel between nations opposing one another in the so-called Cold War. The fact of the matter is that Soviet Premier Khrushchev was unwilling to end the world while the American president, conscious of his “being tested,” was not unwilling if it meant proving his “manhood.” Not always, but in this instance the true heroism did not lie with whom the U.S. press reported it did.
But I stray from Okazaki’s fine film. (It is good sometimes to stray.) The weirdest episode of White Light/Black Rain surely involves the meeting between Robert Lewis (see above) and Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, leader of the Hiroshima Maidens Project, televised on the freakish TV show This Is Your Life. Tanimoto was chaperoning Japanese teens to whom a U.S. hospital was donating plastic surgeries to diminish—erasure was impossible—physical outcomes of the atom bombings. This grotesque television exploitation has to be seen to be believed.
And once all that Okazaki has to show is seen, like Rev. Tanimoto one is very likely to find oneself in tears that cannot be suppressed.
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MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
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