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The Interpreter review
2005.04.30 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole
Nicole Kidman, interpreting some dude's ass. [official site] |
I had my doubts about The Interpreter. I had my worries. When we first see him, Sean Penn is taking off his wedding ring and getting drunk; that's a bad sign. It's a pretty desperate writer who looks at his screenplay and says, "You know what this story needs? A cop with a troubled personal life."
But director Sidney Pollock knows what he's doing. He avoids most of the pitfalls of thriller movie-making and maintains a rising tone and deepening plot thruout that keeps you guessing. It's not a great film, but it's not the wearisome tripe that Hollywood usually puts out.
[T]he black Africans in dark suits who get out of a fancy car are Bad Guys in capital letters. |
The Interpreter begins on foreign ground: a war-torn African nation where three men find themselves in over their heads, and dead bodies are the logical result. We don't really know who these men are exactly, but we do know that the black Africans in dark suits who get out of a fancy car are Bad Guys in capital letters.
Cut to the UN, where Nicole Kidman is Sylvia Broome, an interpreter who stumbles upon an assassination plot and accidentally identifies herself to the conspirators. Penn arrives (along with partner Catherine Keener, whose role merits exactly one parenthetical mention) not to protect her but to investigate her. He's protecting the threatened foreign dignitary who is soon to arrive in the US... or one of them, anyway.
[I]t's a clever way for Pollock to keep things complicated just in case you started to remember which African guy is which.... |
That's where the plot starts to get murky. There are several prominent African dignitaries, all of whom are nasty people, as far as we can tell. Kidman seems as confused by it as we are and can't help Penn sort it out much. Penn is the outsider in this situation, and Kidman is the insider; there's no reason why Pollack can't use use that relationship to remind his audience several times who the Africans are.
If you've seen the trailer, you know that Kidman's character turns out to have a checkered past. That keeps Penn on the proverbial "other side of the river," as the characters put it, and it's a clever way for Pollock to keep things complicated just in case you started to remember which African guy is which or which of Kidman's distant loved ones is which.
The film was written by Charles Randolph (The Life of David Gale), Scott Frank (Minority Report), and Steven Zaillian (The Gangs of New York). Talent like this doesn't come together naturally; there was heavy-duty fixing going on here.
Sean Penn is the worst security chief ever, aside from the guy who guarded Lincoln at Ford's Theater. |
And even so, there are some logical inconsistencies that you can only grasp at the end of the film (and which would therefore spoil it for me to mention), but let me just say that this is a very elaborate assassination plot that relies on a couple of complete coincidences to come off. Actually it doesn't rely on them; in fact, it doesn't need them at all, which makes one wonder why they're there at all, except that then we wouldn't have a movie.
Moreover, the conclusion requires us to believe that Sean Penn is the worst security chief ever, aside from the guy who guarded Lincoln at Ford's Theater. It's not revealing anything to say that, at one point, the plot puts Penn in that age-old chief-of-security situation: shouting too late into a walkie-talkie for people to "Get out of there! Now!"
He also specifically notes after one unfortunate incident that it is a bad idea not to watch both sides of the building Kidman lives in. This does not stop something from happening again when it is convenient. Twice. On both sides of the building at once. While Penn himself is watching. Still, these procedural issues are easy to forgive in context. (Wait, did I mention that the security team monitoring Kidman 24-hours-a-day is completely baffled when she hops on her scooter?)
Kidman looks jittery but ravishing. Penn looks weary but rugged. |
The acting is solid, and the characters are deep and interesting (well, the main characters, anyway. Everyone else is wallpaper. Penn can't keep his colleagues' names straight). Kidman looks jittery but ravishing. Penn looks weary but rugged.
Overall, The Interpreter is a solid thriller with meaty principal roles. But it's entertaining without ever being especially original or clever. That's too bad, because it means that it's a good story that could have been great.
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