3-25-10 Movie Review: The Ghost Writer

Only one noncommercial movie showing over the next seven nights, but is sounds interesting. It’s Diva, from France in 1982, 3 ½ out of four stars in Maltin’s 2010 Movie Guide and 4 ½ out of five in the TV Guide Film and Video Companion of 2004. In Diva, a Parisian man pirates a tape of a black diva and it gets involved with another tape, apparently a police undercover tape, involving drug people. Diva has been criticized as too stylishly shot, but everybody seems to find its visual gorgeousness enjoyable, and it reportedly features a great motorcycle chase. Diva shows at 7:30 Friday in the Murdock Theatre, 536 North Broadway.

And commercially, we have what the Kansas City Star reviewer says “will surely go down as one of [2010’s] best,” Roman Polanski’s thriller for grownups, The Ghost Writer.

The Ghost Writer features mystification, suspense, and real characters in a timely story of sinister international misbehavior involving the United States and England, rendition and Iraq, and a lot of people who are quite believably not what they purport to be. Realistically, it ends by solving just about as many of its mysteries as it should, and it avoids superheroics in favor of the ways people might really behave. In other words, for this once you don’t have to fight off the objections of your own brain as the complications develop.

The most interesting character, to me, is the ex-prime minister’s wife, who wavers credibly between the embittered woman who never wanted public life, the jealous wife who suspects her husband has been unfaithful, and the still-in-love wife who will go to questionable lengths to protect the man she still regards as her own. The star is Olivia Williams, who I don’t recall seeing before, hardly a standard beauty but sensually attractive in an unusual earthy way and an actress great at playing the undermeaning. The actual lead is ever-popular Ewan McGregor, in a very understating mood as a pretty ordinary guy whose curiosity gets too much for him and leads him into tracking down clues that his common sense tells him to leave alone; there is no James Bond in him and I sometimes question his general intelligence, but he’s sympathetic and so clearly in over his head that you really do worry about him because he’s not as smart as you suspect the people he’s up against are.

Kim Cattrall of Sex in the City is interestingly cast as a woman who may be the mistress or may just be the hard, businesslike assistant of Pierce Brosnan’s ex-prime minister, and Eli Wallach, Tim Hutton, and I swear Jim Belushi appear in support. But there’s little sex, little reckless driving, no costumed superheroes, and no big orange explosions, in fact, not a lot of physical action, in Ghost Writer. Director Polanski seems to be expecting a grownup audience, so the run may not be long.