Superb 'Ghost writer' may be director's last

Here’s a movie for another time.

Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer” is far too good a film to be trickled out in limited release in February and March, a time that’s usually considered Hollywood’s dumping ground.

A prescient story strained through the cinematic vocabulary of mid-20th century Alfred Hitchcock, “The Ghost Writer” is a sophisticated and meaty thriller.

It’s also deliriously entertaining and funny.

Ewan McGregor plays a ghost writer (we never learn his name; he only ever refers to himself as “The Ghost”) given the opportunity of a lifetime — complete the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) after the original author washes up dead on a Cape Cod beach, the victim of a drunken accident.

“He wasn’t a politician,” The Ghost tells his agent, “he was a craze.”

Lang is hiding out in America, under investigation by the Hague for war crimes following his authorization of the illegal rendition of suspected terrorists for torture by the CIA.

Monastically holed up in a glass house (you know what they say about glass houses) along with the former PM, Lang’s beautiful but frumpy wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), and his personal assistant

mistress, Amelia (Kim Cattrall), life for The Ghost is turned upside down only days into his assignment, when they are beset on all sides by a horde of reporters and protesters. Things go from bad to worse when The Ghost stumbles onto clues in his predecessor’s effects indicating that war crimes may be the least of Lang’s transgressions. Was his predecessor killed for what he uncovered, and is he next?

“The Ghost Writer” is the first great film of 2010, a spare, unpretentious thriller with a snappy script and precise, intimate cinematography. The environment inside the claustrophobic, mausoleum-like house is as cold and oppressive as the weather outside — an unceasing, bitter winter rain, where, metaphorically, ground crews participate in a futile game of keeping the residence clear of storm-tossed debris. Tonally, I was reminded of Polanski’s “MacBeth” (1971), a film whose settings and actors are similarly soaked through with driving rain and oozing muck. “The Ghost Writer,” as luck would have it, even has a passable Lady MacBeth.

Polanski bathes his audience in gut-wringing tension, though it is a gambit he rarely consummates — so that when he does make good on the set-up, the payoff is that much more unsettling. The film operates as a paranoid, 1970s thriller, but while it tosses out a few jabs at Halliburton, illegal rendition and detainee torture, it is ultimately less interested in politics and more interested in embalming its audience in expectant foreboding. The last five minutes are as good as anything you’ve ever seen.

McGregor is perfect as the ambitious yet morally conflicted writer who probably should have spent more time writing and less time playing detective. Brosnan is pitch perfect as a Tony Blair-esque stand-in, ignorant, perhaps, but in no way dim-witted or unintelligent. Williams, an underappreciated actress if ever there was one, plays the role of the maligned spouse with perplexing fire, and though she thoroughly mangles her British accent every chance she gets, Cattrall is present because there are so few women her age who can pull off the character she seems to perfectly embody.

This is likely Polanski’s final film. The 76-year-old currently sits under house arrest in Switzerland, awaiting extradition to America (a theme mischievously mirrored in the film) for fleeing the country after a 1977 statutory rape charge.

Luckily, I am a film critic, not a director’s morality critic. But if “The Ghost Writer” is the last time the celebrated director is ever behind the camera, he will have exited the stage with an atmospheric, suspenseful political thriller that, if not among his greatest works, is certainly among his most pleasurable.

GHOST WRITER

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams, Kim Cattrall, Tom Wilkinson

Director: Roman Polanski

Theater: Kimball’s

Rated: PG-13 (for language, brief nudity sexuality, some violence and a drug reference)

Running time: 2 hour, 8 minutes

GRADE: A