"Married?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Gay?"

"No."

"Just gotten out of a bad affair?"

"Despite 40,000 years of human history, it's impossible to properly describe my past relationship."

The Ghost Writer, an almost indecently entertaining movie about a charming, absurdly delinquent politician, has washed up on Cotton Mather's old stomping ground, produced, directed, co-written and edited by a filmmaker under house arrest in the home of the cuckoo clock.

At 76, Roman Polanski hasn't lost his feel for that lonely place where cosmetically enhanced, morally slippery over-achievers grapple for power, commit unthinkable high crimes, then beg our indulgence as they figure out how to sell their highly implausible versions of those crimes back to us.

The Ghost Writer opens as the Anglo-American handlers of Adam Lang, the recently resigned, freshly disgraced British Prime Minister (a slyly imperious Pierce Brosnan), struggle to replace the now embarrassingly-dead chump charged with putting Lang's once-charmed life between the covers of an already over-touted political memoir.

One of the cheeky pleasures of biting into The Ghost Writer is to appreciate how Polanski has concocted a surface tale of brazenly self-serving professional liars as mere foreplay for the truly cold-blooded story of how top-dog nations are governed.

The movie kicks into high gear when we meet the new chump, the never-named title character played to a T by Ewan McGregor, finally reaching his prime. Sporting the almost unnervingly boyish masculinity that is the trademark of such charming late bloomers as pop rock's Jon Bon Jovi or baseball's Craig Counsell, McGregor convinces us that he's a real adult capable of facing down Lang's brutal spin doctors and perhaps the "great man" himself, while at the same time giving out

Nick Turani protests the proposed new location of The Barnes Foundation in The Art of the Steal.

almost undetectable clues that he's the proper heir to Chinatown's Jake Gittes, doomed always to be a fatal beat behind the real skullduggery at the heart of this beastly story.

Like Gittes, McGregor's ghost writer is led to his doom by a femme fatale, or in this case by a diabolical team of female schemers. Olivia Williams is awesomely seductive as Lang's once-top confidant and now-spurned frau, while Kim Cattrall (Sex in the City) is very funny as the devilishly efficient, ever-so-slightly perky assistant who's terribly close to the boss. A key component of Polanski's bait-and-switch plot dynamic is our assumption that the mid-film bond between Williams and McGregor heralds a very different set of moral and physical dilemmas than the ones he actually faces.

It seems almost impertinent to put The Ghost Writer on the same pedestal occupied by Polanski's peerless collaboration with Nicholson, Dunaway, Huston and Towne, but the parallels in tone, theme and the earlier masterwork's uncanny grasp of just how and why absolute power corrupts make it obligatory. At the heart of Chinatown 's fateful denouement is Gittes' blind refusal to acknowledge that he's in way over his head. In perhaps one of the greatest exchanges in American film, John Huston's jocularly corrupt Noah Cross lays it on the line.

"Mr. Gittes, you may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't. Why is that funny?"

"It's what the D.A. used to tell me about Chinatown."

"Was he right?"

In a matching moment in The Ghost Writer, an enraged, caught-out Lang, safely nestled in his publisher's private jet, spews out the hard bargain in "Free World" governments' contracts with their citizen/subjects. As the ex-PM, Brosnan is jolly good at capturing just the right note of anger and contempt in the tone of a "great man" who's unaccustomed to spelling things out for a paid hack like the ghost writer.

"If I got back into power, I'd set up two airport lines. On one, we'd perform no background checks, no intrusive invasions of our citizens' fucking precious civil liberties. On the other, we'd do everything to ensure that people got to their destinations safely. I wonder which one the likes of you would choose to fly."

Employing non-intrusive technical wizardry that allows Northern Germany to stand in for the Kennedy crowd's favorite island hideaways in the Northeast US, Polanski uses simulated sex and rain as well as his patented free-floating paranoia to suggest political scandals hinting at but transcending the Cheney/Bush fiascos. The sinister, pristine beach setting conjures up the ghosts of Chappaquiddick and the death of liberal lion Teddy's presidential dreams.

The words never come up, but if they did, it would be fitting if McGregor's ghost writer got this exit line from his oppressively jocular Jerry Maguire-like agent: "It's Chappaquiddick, Jake."

The Art of the Steal: If you're up for an old-fashioned pissing contest between establishment types who don't usually wave their dirty linen around for the likes of us, catch this hyper-detailed examination of what happens when a combustible mix of race, class and aesthetic imperialism allows the well-connected to steal something fair and square. Don Argott has done his homework on the deals that grease the wheels in an American city (Philadelphia) looking to burnish its image and create an elite tourist trap at the expense of a man's dream.

It's a must-see for art aficionados, as well as for those of us still holding well-thumbed copies of Sister Wendy's 1,000 Masterpieces. The only question raised by this audaciously one-sided salvo is whether to see it on the big screen or wait for the DVD.