Speed the parting guest
A review requested by Brennan, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
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To begin with the low-hanging fruit, I would like to suggest that there should be absolutely no doubt at all that Suffering Man's Charity is a better title than Ghost Writer, and I think that's true regardless of what it's the title of. In this case, it’s the second feature film directed by actor Alan Cumming, from a screenplay by Thomas Gallagher, which had a film festival run under the former title throughout 2007, before being released straight to video under the latter title early in 2009. And since Ghost Writer is how the film has been known throughout its commercial lifespan, I shall with great irritation and reluctance use that title in this review. But I shan't be happy about it.
By any name, Ghost Writer is the story of a snobby music teacher named John Vandermark (Cumming), whose favorite things to cultivate are an all-encompassing sense of his own superiority, and broke, handsome young men to be his houseguests and whatever else might happen, while he supports their burgeoning careers as artists. The current one of these is Sebastian St. Germain (David Boreanaz), who has been living in John’s tastefully cluttered home for months now, and they have been throughly miserable ones for John. For one thing, there has been no "whatever else"; Sebastian appears to be egregiously heterosexual. For another, his career as a novelist remains stubbornly unburgeoned, and John is beginning to suspect that there is no career as a novelist, just an elaborate con involving a novel that's conveniently never quite ready for the patron to so much as take a look at it. As John explains all of this to the man who is apparently his only friend, Eric Rykell (Henry Thomas), and that's relying on a generously stretched definition of "friend" to mean "person who can tolerate being around me for any length of time", the time has finally come to throw Sebastian out, at long last. But only after playing some very nasty tricks on him in an effort to extract his long overdue share of the bills.
All of the above is, in a very real sense, not actually what Ghost Writer is about. At the very least, once one has reached the film's conclusion, I do not think that one would see fit to describe it as "that film about about the gay music snob trying to un-keep his kept man". Nor would one probably have given it the name Ghost Writer, even if one's hatred for Suffering Man's Charity was so intense that literally anything else would seem like an improvement.
And it's good that the film isn't all of those things, because frankly they're not very interesting; any entertainment value it accrues during this set-up phase of its plot is, I think, entirely due to the actors, and absolutely never to Gallagher's overdone dialogue, nor to Cumming's "good enough" approach to directing a movie. The big problem here is that the plot I've sketched out for you thus far is literally half of the film's running time. Given that Ghost Writer ends up at some 92 minutes in length, half of it isn't so very long to suffer through; the flipside is that it only has an equally short second half (even, to be honest, a bit shorter) to start doing things right. And the things it's doing right aren’t exactly setting the world on fire, or presenting us with new ideas about the toxic narcissism of failed artists with a superiority complex.
It's pretty easy to read this all as a deliberate fake-out, promising a certain kind of quippy indie melodrama so that when it reveals itself to be a dark comedy thriller, we'll be as knocked on our ass by the development as the characters themselves. This is an admirable feint in theory, but it runs hard into a question: is the extended first act actually watchable? And I confess that I wasn't really anywhere close to the film's wavelength for any of that. It's definitely a wavelength movie, too: probably the most distinctive thing about it all throughout, not just during its first part, is the unmistakable, specific energy of the film's comic mood. It's surely reductive to call it "Cumming energy" (and unfair to Gallagher, who originated the project), because who really knows what goes on inside Alan Cumming's heart of hearts, anyway? But if you know enough of the man's public-facing persona to have a guess as to the kind of thing Cumming would want to sign his name to as director, I think you will probably have a fairly close guess as to the mood Ghost Writer occupies. "Camp" gets us heading in the right direction, though not far enough, and not, I think, in the right mood; what I tend to think of campiness tends to be at least a bit celebratory, genuinely delighted by the offbeat, the trashy, and the antisocial.
Ghost Writer is much more aggressive and, at times, genuinely meanspirited than proper camp. There's an edge of rage, and this, I think, is where the Cumming-ness happens.Because there is, to my mind at least some measure of rabid darkness that generally tends to flicker around Cumming's best performances, something sharklike in both its sharpness and its potential for ferocity. John is a role particularly well-suited to allow Cumming to flex this particular muscle, and he ends up making the entire movie match the approach he's taken to the role. When it's in the tragicomic gay relationship drama mode that it pretends to be for the first bit, this mostly comes out as a certain manic, shouting comic energy, a shrieking "look at me, I'm so zany" quality that gives the film a certain devil-may-care flippancy as it gets moving. I will not lie: I found it tiresome. "Loud = funny" is at least a contender for my very least favorite kind of humor, and Ghost Writer plays that card eagerly in its early going. One must grant to the movie this much: it's committed as hell. Cumming and Boreanaz are attacking the script with a great deal of force; the latter, I am altogether shocked to report, might even impress me more than former. Given how little personality I tend to ever see in Boreanaz's acting, I would never have expected he could go toe-to-toe with someone as sly and elusive as Cumming, but where as the director mostly allows himself to stay within a narrow range of colors (shouty, haughty, flummoxed in a sneering and hostile way), Boreanaz keeps finding new different ways of shading in Sebastian's nasty sides while clinging to baseline of affable bro-ey charisma that explains why John would have found Sebastian appealing in the first place. And that's before the film shifts on its axis and gives Boreanaz a very different set of registers to play, which he does with perfectly-formed sarcasm.
The two central actors keep Ghost Writer moving forward even when it seems like its script is just going to endlessly mine the same small number of comic modes. Cumming-the-director doesn't help with this at all; he rarely seems to have given any thought to what the camera can do to pull out things that aren't front-and-center in the performances (on top of which, the film is pretty damn ugly - it was undoubtedly dirt-cheap, but still), and I was surprised by how little thought he seems to have put into giving himself and the rest of the cast "business" to do - it's a film full of people sitting still and talking, and that needs a much sharper script to work. Frankly, much more acute, focused performances, as well: while Cumming and Boreanaz legitimately knocked my socks off, the film's unexpectedly deep bench of cameos mostly comes up nil. In addition to Henry Thomas (who gets what I think is the third-largest role), space is made for Carrie Fisher, Jane Lynch, and Anne Heche, and every one of them is mostly just showing up to fill space and help put over a seen or two. Only Karen Black, as Sebastian's outrageously drunk one-night-stand whose presence finally shoves John into action, clearly understands the big quasi-camp brio that the film has decided to claim as its own, and she gives easily my favorite performance here, messy and outlandish and threading the needle between aggressive comedy and tacky melodrama impeccably.
To be very clear, when the film makes its pivot into its second part, it improves considerable. The pivot itself involves unexpected sexualised violence played for a different kind of dark humor than anything else in the film; the second part, properly defined, is basically a different movie with a different character who happens to share John's name in the lead role; Cumming isn't even really playing him the same way: he drops a somewhat tedious "priggish opera fan" mode to go straight for a barely-hidden psychopathic glee that isn't really any more or less nuanced, but it is certainly more immediately arresting, and it's not contingent on the film's bad sense of humor to work well. The question then really becomes: is this latter part good enough to overcome what a dirge the first part is? I frankly don't think so: first impressions are lasting impressions, and outside of the lead performances, the first act of Ghost Writer is big and manic in ways I find extremely tedious to watch. Still, I can easily imagine the cult for this that should have formed: it's a blast of undiluted Cumming like nothing else I've seen, and I think enough people would be into that for this to have literally any sort of visibility, which it has completely lacked thus far. It's a live-wire of a film, no two ways about it, and I can easily imagine the type of person for whom these jolts are extremely exciting.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Do you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
To begin with the low-hanging fruit, I would like to suggest that there should be absolutely no doubt at all that Suffering Man's Charity is a better title than Ghost Writer, and I think that's true regardless of what it's the title of. In this case, it’s the second feature film directed by actor Alan Cumming, from a screenplay by Thomas Gallagher, which had a film festival run under the former title throughout 2007, before being released straight to video under the latter title early in 2009. And since Ghost Writer is how the film has been known throughout its commercial lifespan, I shall with great irritation and reluctance use that title in this review. But I shan't be happy about it.
By any name, Ghost Writer is the story of a snobby music teacher named John Vandermark (Cumming), whose favorite things to cultivate are an all-encompassing sense of his own superiority, and broke, handsome young men to be his houseguests and whatever else might happen, while he supports their burgeoning careers as artists. The current one of these is Sebastian St. Germain (David Boreanaz), who has been living in John’s tastefully cluttered home for months now, and they have been throughly miserable ones for John. For one thing, there has been no "whatever else"; Sebastian appears to be egregiously heterosexual. For another, his career as a novelist remains stubbornly unburgeoned, and John is beginning to suspect that there is no career as a novelist, just an elaborate con involving a novel that's conveniently never quite ready for the patron to so much as take a look at it. As John explains all of this to the man who is apparently his only friend, Eric Rykell (Henry Thomas), and that's relying on a generously stretched definition of "friend" to mean "person who can tolerate being around me for any length of time", the time has finally come to throw Sebastian out, at long last. But only after playing some very nasty tricks on him in an effort to extract his long overdue share of the bills.
All of the above is, in a very real sense, not actually what Ghost Writer is about. At the very least, once one has reached the film's conclusion, I do not think that one would see fit to describe it as "that film about about the gay music snob trying to un-keep his kept man". Nor would one probably have given it the name Ghost Writer, even if one's hatred for Suffering Man's Charity was so intense that literally anything else would seem like an improvement.
And it's good that the film isn't all of those things, because frankly they're not very interesting; any entertainment value it accrues during this set-up phase of its plot is, I think, entirely due to the actors, and absolutely never to Gallagher's overdone dialogue, nor to Cumming's "good enough" approach to directing a movie. The big problem here is that the plot I've sketched out for you thus far is literally half of the film's running time. Given that Ghost Writer ends up at some 92 minutes in length, half of it isn't so very long to suffer through; the flipside is that it only has an equally short second half (even, to be honest, a bit shorter) to start doing things right. And the things it's doing right aren’t exactly setting the world on fire, or presenting us with new ideas about the toxic narcissism of failed artists with a superiority complex.
It's pretty easy to read this all as a deliberate fake-out, promising a certain kind of quippy indie melodrama so that when it reveals itself to be a dark comedy thriller, we'll be as knocked on our ass by the development as the characters themselves. This is an admirable feint in theory, but it runs hard into a question: is the extended first act actually watchable? And I confess that I wasn't really anywhere close to the film's wavelength for any of that. It's definitely a wavelength movie, too: probably the most distinctive thing about it all throughout, not just during its first part, is the unmistakable, specific energy of the film's comic mood. It's surely reductive to call it "Cumming energy" (and unfair to Gallagher, who originated the project), because who really knows what goes on inside Alan Cumming's heart of hearts, anyway? But if you know enough of the man's public-facing persona to have a guess as to the kind of thing Cumming would want to sign his name to as director, I think you will probably have a fairly close guess as to the mood Ghost Writer occupies. "Camp" gets us heading in the right direction, though not far enough, and not, I think, in the right mood; what I tend to think of campiness tends to be at least a bit celebratory, genuinely delighted by the offbeat, the trashy, and the antisocial.
Ghost Writer is much more aggressive and, at times, genuinely meanspirited than proper camp. There's an edge of rage, and this, I think, is where the Cumming-ness happens.Because there is, to my mind at least some measure of rabid darkness that generally tends to flicker around Cumming's best performances, something sharklike in both its sharpness and its potential for ferocity. John is a role particularly well-suited to allow Cumming to flex this particular muscle, and he ends up making the entire movie match the approach he's taken to the role. When it's in the tragicomic gay relationship drama mode that it pretends to be for the first bit, this mostly comes out as a certain manic, shouting comic energy, a shrieking "look at me, I'm so zany" quality that gives the film a certain devil-may-care flippancy as it gets moving. I will not lie: I found it tiresome. "Loud = funny" is at least a contender for my very least favorite kind of humor, and Ghost Writer plays that card eagerly in its early going. One must grant to the movie this much: it's committed as hell. Cumming and Boreanaz are attacking the script with a great deal of force; the latter, I am altogether shocked to report, might even impress me more than former. Given how little personality I tend to ever see in Boreanaz's acting, I would never have expected he could go toe-to-toe with someone as sly and elusive as Cumming, but where as the director mostly allows himself to stay within a narrow range of colors (shouty, haughty, flummoxed in a sneering and hostile way), Boreanaz keeps finding new different ways of shading in Sebastian's nasty sides while clinging to baseline of affable bro-ey charisma that explains why John would have found Sebastian appealing in the first place. And that's before the film shifts on its axis and gives Boreanaz a very different set of registers to play, which he does with perfectly-formed sarcasm.
The two central actors keep Ghost Writer moving forward even when it seems like its script is just going to endlessly mine the same small number of comic modes. Cumming-the-director doesn't help with this at all; he rarely seems to have given any thought to what the camera can do to pull out things that aren't front-and-center in the performances (on top of which, the film is pretty damn ugly - it was undoubtedly dirt-cheap, but still), and I was surprised by how little thought he seems to have put into giving himself and the rest of the cast "business" to do - it's a film full of people sitting still and talking, and that needs a much sharper script to work. Frankly, much more acute, focused performances, as well: while Cumming and Boreanaz legitimately knocked my socks off, the film's unexpectedly deep bench of cameos mostly comes up nil. In addition to Henry Thomas (who gets what I think is the third-largest role), space is made for Carrie Fisher, Jane Lynch, and Anne Heche, and every one of them is mostly just showing up to fill space and help put over a seen or two. Only Karen Black, as Sebastian's outrageously drunk one-night-stand whose presence finally shoves John into action, clearly understands the big quasi-camp brio that the film has decided to claim as its own, and she gives easily my favorite performance here, messy and outlandish and threading the needle between aggressive comedy and tacky melodrama impeccably.
To be very clear, when the film makes its pivot into its second part, it improves considerable. The pivot itself involves unexpected sexualised violence played for a different kind of dark humor than anything else in the film; the second part, properly defined, is basically a different movie with a different character who happens to share John's name in the lead role; Cumming isn't even really playing him the same way: he drops a somewhat tedious "priggish opera fan" mode to go straight for a barely-hidden psychopathic glee that isn't really any more or less nuanced, but it is certainly more immediately arresting, and it's not contingent on the film's bad sense of humor to work well. The question then really becomes: is this latter part good enough to overcome what a dirge the first part is? I frankly don't think so: first impressions are lasting impressions, and outside of the lead performances, the first act of Ghost Writer is big and manic in ways I find extremely tedious to watch. Still, I can easily imagine the cult for this that should have formed: it's a blast of undiluted Cumming like nothing else I've seen, and I think enough people would be into that for this to have literally any sort of visibility, which it has completely lacked thus far. It's a live-wire of a film, no two ways about it, and I can easily imagine the type of person for whom these jolts are extremely exciting.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Categories: comedies, indies and pseudo-indies, thrillers
