The Ghost Writer is a solid movie, but perhaps Polanski should have hired a Ghost Editor. The first 40 mins of this movie could have been cut down to about 15 mins. It took forever to get to the point of the movie. By then I found myself looking at the clock and feeling bad that I made my wife waste her time watching this. I don’t know if the scenes in Mass. were always really in Mass., but there were aspects that just didn’t look right. The dubbed cursing was a bit weird as well. McGregor was good, but overall it just missed the mark. It felt like a 2-hour exercise in film making to tell a story that could have literally been told in one sentence, proven so by the ending.
I thoroughly enjoyed “The Ghost Writer.” The cast was excellent. The line between “good” and “evil” is a bit blurred, which is always interesting to me. This film had many “Hitchcockian” nuances to it, which kept me engrossed in the film. It is definitely not a fast paced film, but it didn’t need to be. It’s subtlety is one of its finer points. My only disappointment was self-inflicted, so I want to warn others who may do the same thing to themselves unwittingly. I have a habit of watching DVD “Special Features” before I watch a movie. Especially if I want to know a little about the background of a story, which might “enhance” my viewing of the film. Well, I have never had THE FEATURES COMPLETELY GIVE AWAY THE ENDING of a film before. So, unless you want the ending to be ruined for you, DO NOT WATCH THE SPECIAL FEATURES BEFORE VIEWING THE FILM.
The plot of The Ghost Writer starts off subtle, and then slowly develops and evolves through unexpected twists. There are no special effects that these days make up for lack of plot in blockbuster films. The thriller shows what can happen when power and authority are given to people without morals and social values – or perhaps whose social and political values are in the extreme. Not to get political, but this British film could be transformed into an American film if the key players were both Bushes, Cheney, Blair and Halliburton.