The Ghost Writer
The Ghost Writer Stars Ewan McGregor as a biographer appropriately unnamed and in over his head when with a lot of cajoling by his friend Sidney Kroll (Timothy Hutton)he’s hired by John Maddox (a hairless Jim Belushi) as the nom de plume for Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) a very Tony Blair like ex British Prime Minister whose former ghost writer is recently quite literally a ghost due to drowning. The audience starts to doubt the accidental nature of his passing far sooner than our anonymous scribe does but the pieces start to fall in place as he observes the interaction of Mrs Lang (Olivia Williams) and Amelia Bly (BC’s Kim Cattrall with a convincing British accent) at the States side eastern seaboard bunker of the former PM and his entourage. As Adam Lang becomes the target of the International Court for war crimes our writer gets in jeopardy by confronting former CIA recruiter and Lang college mate Paul Emmett (Tom Wilkinson with a passable American accent). The Ghost Writer is a fabulously witty political thriller that may have as much to do with politics off the screen as on. It seems more than a coincidence that director Roman Polanski suddenly gets arrested for a nasty crime decades ago just as he’s receiving awards for a film that says “you think what I did was bad, look what these guys got away with”.