Word: writer
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...sure to serve a long jail term, he fled the U.S., never to return. He seemed secure living in Paris, making films in France and Germany, until a visit to Switzerland last Sept. led to his detention on an international arrest warrant. He completed the editing of The Ghost Writer while under house arrest...
...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 job because the previous...
...difference between Hollywood and European films: the first has to 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...
...mostly in Massachusetts, the movie was shot at Berlin's Babelsburg studio, where Polanski earlier created the Warsaw Ghetto for his most explicitly autobiographical film, The Pianist, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director in 2003. The Ghost Writer is unlikely to earn him such acclaim. The villainy surrounding its hero is vast but not, in Oscar terms, important; and there are a few giggle moments, as when one of Lang's women pops into the Ghost's bed. But we should hail a movie that recalls creepy political thrillers of the mid-'70s, back when some...
...Staff writer Emmett Kistler can be reached at ekistler@fas.harvard.edu...