Ghosts of the truth

John Keogh reviews The Ghost Writer and Cemetery Junction.

The Ghost Writer
DIRECTED BY: Roman Polanski
STARRING: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams, Kim Cattrall
CERT: 15A

Roman Polanski put the finishing touches to The Ghost Writer while under house arrest in Switzerland – where he surely often pondered the fate of a central character in the film, a famous foreign exile whose dark past has caught up with him.
Based on the bestseller by Robert Harris – who co-wrote the screenplay – The Ghost Writer stars Ewan McGregor as a writer hired to work on the memoirs of former British Prime Minister, Adam Lang (Brosnan). It’s a big step up for a man more accustomed to ghost writing the biographies of rock stars and 15-minute celebrities. But he takes the gig, despite his ignorance of politics – and despite the fact that the writer he’s replacing has met with an unfortunate end.
His subject was once a political Messiah, but he’s fallen from grace, with a reputation now as a mere puppet for the big boys in the US government. Worse still, Lang stands accused of war crimes, following reports that he sanctioned the torture of terrorist suspects. And so he takes refuge in America, where the Ghost finds him holed up at his big, cold beach house in Martha’s Vineyard – along with his wife Ruth (Williams) and his assistant Amelia (Cattrall), who appears to perform the double service of being Lang’s personal bedroom aide.
As McGregor gets to work and starts digging around – not least in the former First Lady’s intimate affairs – he finds that his dearly departed predecessor might have stumbled across a bit more information than was good for him. Ultimately, the reluctant hero finds himself on the trail of our good old friend, The Big Conspiracy.
The Ghost Writer is probably not Polanski’s finest hour and, overall, it’s a bit too slight to do full justice to its weighty subject matter – or indeed to Harris’s novel, a very thinly-veiled swipe at Tony Blair. His adaptation is not the strongest of scripts and it does have an unfortunate tendency to be preachy. But it’s a fine film all the same.
Like Scorsese’s Shutter Island, its look and tone are an homage to the old noir classics and there’s plenty of nods to Polanski’s hero, Mr Hitchcock – as well as to classic spy thrillers of the 70s like Three Days Of The Condor. He unfolds the story, too, in a welcome old fashioned manner – slow and steady, with an emphasis on genuine tension rather than needless action, jumpy cameras or gimmicky editing – the bane of modern cinema.
And as he has always shown, he knows how to get the best out of his cast. Ewan McGregor has long been in need of more roles like this and it’s always a pleasure to see Pierce Brosnan stretching himself beyond the old smooth comfort zone. Both are in good form, knocking around some very fine dialogue at times – while Williams and Cattrall compete admirably for the femme fatale title.
There’s some excellent support from Jim Belushi as McGregor’s publisher, Timothy Hutton as Lang’s lawyer and the great Tom Wilkinson as a Harvard professor who may know a thing or two about the ex PM’s murky work.
Well worth a watch.

Cemetery Junction
DIRECTED BY: Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant
STARRING: Christian Cooke, Felicity Jones, Ralph Fiennes, Ricky Gervais
CERT: 15A

If Roman Polanski can tip his hat to the 70s, then so can Ricky Gervais, eh? Or so he believes, anyway.
The word on this was that Gervais and his Office mucker Merchant were taking a time-out from comedy. Which was interesting news to some of us, who can’t seem to remember when they were ever funny.
Whatever your feelings on the pair’s widely-lauded TV efforts, their first feature film as writers and directors is a bit of a shambles.
Set in 1973, it’s the story of three young English friends who dream of better things, preferably far away from their home in Cemetery Junction.
Freddie (Cooke) is a nice chap who dreads spending his whole life working in a factory like his dad (Gervais); Bruce (Tom Hughes) is a loudmouthed gouger who doesn’t want to end up a drunken waster like his old man (Francis Magee) and Snork (Jack Doolan) is a clown who will probably never grow up, full stop.
Freddie puts his foot on the ladder when he takes a job at an insurance office – where he works for the snake-eyed Mr Kendrick (Fiennes) and instantly falls for the boss’s daughter Julie (Felicity Jones). She shares Freddie’s dreams of leaving their dead-end life far behind – which would be fine if she wasn’t already halfway down the aisle with Daddy’s office golden boy, Mike (Matthew Goode).
No prizes for guessing how all that turns out – and no big cigar for Mr Gervais, whose youth was hopefully a lot more exciting than he remembers it here.
But hats off to his cast, who make what they can of some pretty shoddy material and a round of applause too for a fine soundtrack featuring the likes of Bowie, T-Rex, Slade and Roxy Music.