Rated: PG-13

Release Date: 03/05/2010

Production Company: Summit International

Ewan McGregor, Tom Wilkinson, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, Timothy Hutton, Olivia Williams and Jon Bernthal.

Director: Roman Polanski. Producers: Roman Polanski, Robert Benmussa, Alain Sarde, Charlie Woebcken, Christoph Fisser, Oliver Luer and Henning Molfenter. Executive Producer: Henning Molfenter. Cinematographer: Pawel Edelman

By: Chris Cabin, FilmCritic.com

The title character of Roman Polanski's new film "The Ghost Writer," played by Ewan McGregor, is interviewed and hired to work on the biography of Adam Lang, a notorious, handsome British Prime Minister, within the film's first ten minutes.

His take-it-or-leave-it credentials are outweighed by the promise that he will find the "heart" of his subject and uncover the true Lang, but the penman remains unaware of much of his subject's past, even as the pages of his work flutter down the street while the film fades to black.

Despite a media circus surrounding his allowing of four Iraqi prisoners to be tortured by the CIA, Lang (a sharp Pierce Brosnan) enters and exits the film shrouded in mystery. There's no doubt that Polanski, who edited the film under house arrest in Gstaad, identifies with Lang's situation and, perhaps, is plagued by pangs of jealousy.

It would be naïve not to notice a caustic, barely concealed contempt roaring beneath "The Ghost Writer" for a country that spends more time (and ink) on a questionable rape case than uncountable instances of accepted torture and murder.

But Lang, unlike Polanski, doesn't really have to answer for his crimes --he's a politician, after all -- and the film, based on Robert Harris's best-seller "The Ghost" and adapted to the screen by the author, isn't nearly as personal as its indignation would have you think.

McGregor's ghost, who is never properly named, arrives in the wake of his predecessor's suicide and is quickly put to the task of shaping press releases while he works on the biography. Pulled aimlessly by both Lang's wife (a very good Olivia Williams) and his mistress-cum-aide (Kim Cattrall), the ghost is followed and threatened by any number of shadowy cronies as he wades in a tide-pool of insinuations and grim prognostications, many of which are discredited by the great Tom Wilkinson, as a rumored Lang associate, in the film's most riveting scene.

Neither bore nor wild travesty, "The Ghost Writer" idles in tentative horror for most of its 130 minutes and often feels as if its production team, Polanski included, can't fully comprehend what they are putting to screen. This isn't necessarily out of character for the French-born filmmaker, but there's an undeniable lack of the gleeful perversity that identified Polanski as a bold and singular artist in the '60s and '70s.

Even in comparison to his minor works, "The Ghost Writer" shows little evidence of the Polanski who crafted "The Tenant" or even "The Pianist," no matter how perfectly it may mirror his own disputed exile.

And, unlike Martin Scorsese's similarly themed though far more accomplished "Shutter Island," the film gallops bereft of sense towards a clearly visible twist-climax that does little to inform what has happened before it.

To write off "The Ghost Writer" completely would be wrong: The film casts a consistently gloomy mood and is paced rather brilliantly despite its crass ending. What it lacks is any glimmer of the action and violence that is evident in its characters' temperaments and a sense of personal responsibility that Polanski has seemingly excised.

Like the cumbersome tome at its center, or the hazy, twisting life of its chief architect, "The Ghost Writer" is a legacy unformed and scared of its agonized past.

Editor's Note: This review reprinted for N2Entertainment.net with permission from FilmCritic.com.