The Ghost Writer [118 points / 14 votes]
"In form, The Ghost Writer is most reminiscent of Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” On the surface, it brims with a plethora of characters, offers a resonant colour palette and a distinctive landscape. But a closer inspection reveals the artistic detail that went into its creation. Whereas Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece blossoms out of uninflected dots of colour, Roman Polanski’s equally admirable film is an intricate web of performances, both in the actual narrative and out of it. Polanski’s ensemble is what gives the film its power -- it’s what makes the film.
In the centre of it all is Ewan McGregor’s anonymous (that word lately has such a different meaning in the context of the film’s events) writer, a boozing hack, drifting from one shitty biography to the next. McGregor adopts the role’s slimier qualities with gusto: you might not want to be friends with this man, but you’d definitely get drunk with him. Similarly, Pierce Brosnan instills in his character, the former British PM, a shadiness, sure, but also intelligence and cunning behind a veneer of false respectability. Thankfully, he never tries to physically mimic Tony Blair. As his trusting but shifty wife by his side, Olivia Williams is a modern-day Jezebel-meets-Lady Macbeth. Again, you probably wouldn’t want to marry this woman, but you’d fuck the living shit out of her. Which, later, turns out to be the point.
But, naturally, the ensemble is more than just those three. Everyone sparkles, everyone shines. Tom Wilkinson’s the embodiment of corruption and malice, and hats off to the man with the most avuncular face in Hollywood for forging a latter-day career out of playing assholes. Kim Cattrall, despite her risible accent, is wonderful as the ex-PM’s once-hot-but-now-rough-round-the-edges secretary, the first performance of hers I’ve enjoyed since she took off her Vulcan ears. Random cameos, from Tim Hutton (!), Eli Wallach (!!), and Jim Belushi (!!!!), add to the film’s Hitchcockian flair as each character comes alive. The sum, as they say, is indeed greater than the parts. But the parts are rather magnificent themselves." - Ali Arikan
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