The Island of Lost Souls

Finding thrills (and a healthy dose of guilt) in Scorsese's "Shutter Island" and Polanski's "The Ghost Writer."

The same could be said for the films of Roman Polanski. Polanski makes crowd-pleasing movies, mostly in easily recognizable genres, but he makes them without the obligatory crowd-pleasing endings. If you should wake up one day and discover you’re the main character in a movie, pray that said movie isn’t directed by Roman Polanski. If it is, odds are your life is about to get a whole lot shittier. Polanski’s characters are, as critics often point out, lonely and paranoid. But even more importantly, they are also doomed.

Think of the most famous line from his most famous film, “Chinatown,” and consider that the hero of the film is a detective who does his job and solves a mystery, but is worse off for it. The same goes for the subject of Polanski’s “Frantic,” an American in Paris who finds his missing wife but causes the death of another young woman in the process. Or what about the subjects of Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy” — a series of films about people who become cut off from the rest of society and slowly lose their minds? Throughout his latest, “The Ghost Writer,” the hero is referred to only as “The Ghost,” a description which feels entirely appropriate to this filmmaker’s body of work. Any Polanski hero who survives their feature will be haunted by its events for the rest of their life.

Ewan McGregor plays this nameless Polanski hero, a man who’s been hired to ghostwrite the autobiography of Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), a Tony Blair-esque disgraced former British Prime Minister living in exile in an ultra-modern seaside house on Martha’s Vineyard. Technically, he’s the second “Ghost” hired for the job; his predecessor, a longtime Lang aide, turns up dead, presumably a victim of suicide, in “The Ghost Writer”’s terrific, Hitchcockian opening sequence.

Traveling from England to begin the job he only takes because of the fat paycheck that comes with it, The Ghost arrives at a house in chaos. Lang is under threat of investigation by the International Criminal Court for his role in illegally extraditing terror suspects to the United States for torture. Lang’s wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) fears for his mental health, and is suspicious of his relationship with his assistant Amelia (Kim Cattrall). To make matters worse, the heightened media scrutiny as a result of the impending ICC investigation means The Ghost has to violate one of his cardinal rules of writing and take up residence in Lang’s house, in the room abandoned by the dead predecessor.

That’s the moment, when The Ghost moves into his forerunner’s room and finds a mysterious envelope filled with photographs, that “The Ghost Writer” fully becomes both a juicy conspiracy thriller in the 1970s mold of movies like “3 Days of the Condor” or “The Parallax View,” and a full-fledged Polanski picture, one that not only recalls his earlier “Apartment Trilogy,” but also the author’s own current legal problems.

Polanski finished the film while under house arrest in Switzerland, a condition probably not that dissimilar than the working conditions under which The Ghost is forced to write Lang’s autobiography, and the atmosphere of isolation in the Lang house is palpable. Like Polanski, Lang lives faces extradition by a court he believes is mistreating him because of his celebrity for a crime in which he claims innocence. The Ghost has another potentially autobiographical Polanski moment when, debating whether to have sex with one of the women living in Lang’s house, he looks himself in the mirror and mutters, “Bad idea,” then goes through with it anyway.

Not that audiences unfamiliar with Polanski or his crimes will be distracted by the autobiographical indulgences. More likely, they won’t even notice; they’ll be too busy getting caught up in what is a fairly simple, but expertly made political thriller. Though the mechanics of how The Ghost finally discovers the film’s final secret remain a wee bit dubious (it’d make great fodder for a segment of “Really? With Seth and Amy” on “SNL”’s Weekend Update), it gives the director the chance send The Ghost off in true doomed Polanski hero style, and to finish his film on a beautiful and haunting final image. One that has an eerily similar echo in “Shutter Island,” funnily enough.

“Shutter Island” opens wide on February 19th; “The Ghost Writer” opens in New York and Los Angeles on February 19th before expanding wide on February 26th.

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