Ewan McGregor Double Feature

            The possibility that Roman Polanski might not make another film renders The Ghost Writer an important piece of the director’s work.  The fact that it is so classically suspenseful and darkly tonal makes it worth just as much discussion.  It also stars Ewan McGregor, which marks its only obvious connection to Trainspotting.  Dark in its subject and humor, it is much more energetic and youthful and a more fitting entry for the early stages of McGregor’s body of work.

            Renton and his droogs are chemical pounding twenty-somethings whose only interest is scoring hits and having fun.  It is nearly impossible not to have just as much fun watching their convoluted antics render the situations more horrifying and delightful.  But there is more than mindless indulgences of chemical companionship and street-level scores.  However sickening and gross, they seem intent on not learning from their mistakes.  The death of a baby only serves as motivation to shoot up.  Even today, and perhaps because of its longevity, the film feels as edgy as modern fare and much more calculated.

            Calculated would be a proper word to describe Polanksi’s moody and dreary thriller.  The sun exists not in this East Coast intrigue and, having been filmed mostly in a studio, we should not be surprised.  Unlike the grimy street feel of Boyle’s film, Polanksi remains enclosed in a smoothly lit if still entirely inhospitable environment.  This is not to say it feel like a story world, it is just gritty-less in comparison.  And this is as it should be.  The story follows a clean-cut ghostwriter who steps into his predecessor’s shoes to pen the prime minister’s life story.  And as the trailer clearly tells us, nothing is as simple as it seems.

            In a squared cement house situated next to the ocean, the writer recomposes the 600+ pages of explication laid down by the work before him.  And as he delves deeper into his subjects career, and associates with his wife, finds the story not so clear-cut.  The usual twists and turns play out in a cold, largely shadowed arena.  The film remains evenly paced and taut from start to finish and concludes in a typically un-American simplicity. 

            Taken back-to-back, the films span almost the entirety of McGregor’s career and both are valued entries.  As is obvious by his casting, they represent age-defining entries as portraits of both his youth and maturity.  The no holds barred energy of his youth mark descriptive foil to his matured and composed aging.  And if anything, his endured diversity proves he has much work ahead of him.

Imminent Death.

SLING BLADE SPOILER ALERT!
Though not explicitly stated at the beginning of the film as was the death of Lester Burnham in American Beauty, the death of Doyle in Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade is just as imminent. We are introduced to the character Karl, a mentally challenged man who murdered his mother and her lover with a Kaiser Blade (some people call it a Sling Blade) when he was a young boy. After many, many years of being locked up in a mental institution, he is released into the free world. Because of the abuse inflicted upon him by his father, Karl's issues with the free world arise when he meets Frank. Frank is a young boy whose father died when he was younger, leaving him and his mother to live life together. His mother sought out a new boyfriend, and unfortunately wound up in the hands of Doyle, an abusive drunkard who loves controlling people.
As Karl befriends young Frank, he learns of his troubles with Doyle. And as Frank learns of Karl's current situation (Frank is living in the back of a repair shop), a deep friendship forms between the two. Frank invites Karl to live with he and his mother, and this is when the audience knows that Karl will kill Doyle. The moment the audience actually meets Doyle, they see him for what he is: a man only concerned with himself, only with a family to make himself look better, seeking to control everything, and never relenting on degrading those around him. He is the abusive father figure in Karl's life once again.
Karl understands, even with his mental challenges, that killing is wrong. But why it is wrong remains elusive to him. The fact that he'd been locked up in a mental institution for forty years makes his understanding of the world very limited. And indeed, after all is said and done and Karl winds back up in the institution, he claims that the world was just "too big" for him.