Director's personal troubles haunt his latest great thriller, 'The Ghost Writer'

Roman Polanski's terrific new thriller The Ghost Writer deftly reminds us what has long made the director so effective, in movies like Repulsion (1965), Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974): his singular knack for taking pulp and transforming it into tense, paranoid drama.

Based on a 2007 Robert Harris novel, the story follows a writer known only as The Ghost (Ewan McGregor) who is hired to rewrite the political memoirs of the former British prime minister (a perfectly shifty Pierce Brosnan). The previous ghost writer committed suicide -- or so it was said -- on a Cape Cod ferryboat. A more cautious man might walk away from the scenario, which sounds too good to be true -- a quarter-million dollars for just four weeks of work. But we're deep in Polanski territory, a world where good people are inexorably drawn into nightmarish circumstances. The Ghost quickly hops a plane to Massachusetts, where the prime minister is holed up.

The Ghost Writer was filmed before the director's most recent spate of legal troubles (though editing was reportedly completed at the Swiss chalet where he is currently under house arrest). Like many of Polanski's pictures, most notoriously his baroque and bloody Macbeth (1971), his first film after the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, this new effort invites an autobiographical scrutiny that Polanski may or may not have intended. As the Ghost arrives at the sterile, modernist mansion and finds himself locked in a room with the manuscript -- which is apparently so explosive that it is kept in a safe -- the film turns into a fascinating meditation on the notion of exile.

The prime minister, it turns out, is about to come under investigation by the Hague for possible war crimes: It's alleged that he arranged for the kidnapping of four British citizens and then allowed them to be waterboarded by the CIA. If he returns to England, he might be arrested. The Ghost, meanwhile, is supposed to be pinning him down for extensive interviews. But he finds his attentions diverted, first by the politician's steely wife (Olivia Williams) and then by his discovery of an old photograph of a well-known university professor (Jim Broadbent), who is said to have connections to the CIA.

Part of the treat of The Ghost Writer, which also features a terrific Kim Cattrall as the prime minister's protective secretary, is that it's not entirely clear with whom Polanski identifies: the paranoid writer/artist who feels the walls closing in around him, or the smooth-operator politician who fears he might never be able to return home. Then again, maybe the joke is on the audience, and all this pseudo-autobiography is just a means by which Polanski can slyly misdirect us from the real matters at hand. As the clues stack up, it's clear that some sort of grave international crime has been committed -- oh, and that the previous ghost writer on the project didn't commit suicide -- but Polanski and Harris (who co-wrote the screenplay adaptation) always manage to stay one teasing step ahead of the audience.

The Ghost Writer doesn't quite have the emotional punch of Polanski's most paranoid classics. McGregor is solid as a figure whose eyes are steadily opened to evildoing, but the screenplay never allows us to fully understand what's going on inside his head. When he turns into a crusader in the final stretch, we don't entirely buy his actions.

That said, the movie burns with so much style and sophisticated technique that you'll be more than willing to forgive this shortcoming.

And after taking such a somber turn with The Pianist (2002), it's wonderful to see Polanski displaying some of the brazen, merciless wit of his early thrillers, such as Knife in the Water (1962) and The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). The Ghost Writer ends with one of the most wicked shots in recent memory, a brutal final twist that sends hundreds of manuscript pages fluttering in the London wind and that alters our understanding of everything that has happened until then. You may not be able to stomach the man's past misdeeds and his present legal troubles, but this movie confirms the plain fact that Polanski is one of the very greatest filmmakers alive.