Word: polanski
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...When Polanski hooked up with the novelist Robert Harris, best known for his Roman fictions Pompeii and Imperium, for a film version of Harris's roman-a-clef The Ghost, he might have felt that the book had been written from his own recipe for paranoid suspense. It's the story of a writer of celebrity lives - a magician's best-seller, for instance, titled I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered - hired to add some marketable pizzazz to the memoirs of Adam Lang, a retired British Prime Minister of the Tony Blair stripe. He's called in on this rush...
...kinship to Polanski's oeuvre is clear enough. The Ghost could be a blending of the director's 1976 The Tenant, in which he starred as a man who rents an apartment where the previous tenant committed suicide and soon believes the neighbors are scheming to force him to kill himself, and the 1999 The Ninth Gate, in which a book dealer sleuths through a antique volume that might be the Devil's autobiography. Need more? Lang, who becomes the focus of a war-crimes investigation in Europe, may be condemned by his past to remain in the U.S. - even...
...life. That picture - with a gallery of unreliable characters weaving a web of lies around the baffled hero, who must discover the perpetrator by searching for clues in hidden notes - has been widely compared to Hitchcock and film noir; but it might also be Scorsese's tribute to Polanski. (See the top 10 movies...
...salesman and his less charismatic but brilliant wife. Is the woman betrayed by the man, or is she controlling him, or both? Could either a U.S. President or a U.K. Prime Minister be a Manchurian candidate, his policies programmed by an outside agency? That's enough conspiracies even for Polanski...
...keep you jazzed every minute, while the second assumes that, having bought your ticket, you'll stick around through the simmering accumulation of details. In that sense, The Ghost Writer is as comforting in its temperate pace and eerie mood as it is chilling in its plot particulars. Polanski feigns interest in the genre's requisite chases, but he's best at stranding the Ghost in wide frame, on a turbulent island, and tightening the noose around his neck as he gets closer to an awful truth. Alexandre Desplat's violins saw away, in approved Bernard Herrmann fashion, as appliers...