Originally published 4/24/05
The Interpreter
Director: Sydney Pollack
Writers: Story by Martin Zellman & Bryan Ward, Screenplay by Charles Randolph, Scott Frank, Steven Zaillian
Producers: Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Kevin Misher
Stars: Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn, Catherine Keener, Jesper Christensen, Yvan Attal, Byron Utley, George Harris, Earl Cameron
You might not have predicted it before, but in The Interpreter we discover to our pleasure that Sean Penn and Sydney Pollack make for an ideal actor/director collaboration. Both are defined by their exactitude and attention to detail – as Tobin Keller, a Secret Service agent clinging to his work for a respite of sane routine, Penn doesn’t just recite the expository dialogue about the shambles of his personal life and leave it to the set dressers make up his office to show he slept on the couch there. His stiff body posture, the way his shirt wrinkles, everything is adjusted just so and we get that extra little breath of authenticity.
The same goes for Pollack, whose best work as a director comes when he is unobtrusive, eschewing flash, and efficiently thorough. In this story of murder and conspiracy at the United Nations, he finds plenty of opportunities for pleasing detail, even winning the unique privilege of shooting in and around the actual U.N. building.
There’s an inimitable authority to the General Assembly Hall, one believes that the world can be re-shaped in this room without the room having to spell it out for us. Darius Khondji, one of the best cinematographers alive, shoots it in a way that’s all the more beautiful for how little it calls attention to itself, unlike his more colorful work in movies like Se7en and The City of Lost Children. But all of that patient professionalism cannot overcome a fundamentally sloppy story and a fatal casting miscalculation.
Keller is in charge of investigating a threat to a foreign dignitary, the dictator of a fictional African nation. As a teacher, “President” Zuwanie (Earl Cameron) inspired a revolution with his idealism, but as the years passed he gradually turned genocidal despot, killing an awful lot of people and really disappointing everyone else. He’s set to come to New York to address the General Assembly, where it is presumed he will make a play to hold onto power by dismissing mass slaughter as a fight against terrorists and promising to look into democratic reform just as soon as he can get around to it.
But a U.N. interpreter Silvia Broome (Nicole Kidman), one of those people on the other ends of the headphones every ambassador has pressed against one ear, overhears a sinister conversation while grabbing something from her booth late one night. It’s whispered, and it’s in Ku, an African dialect primarily spoken in Zuwanie’s country, where she just happened to grow up. And she thinks she knows what they’re talking about when they say “The Teacher will not leave this room alive”.
Agent Keller finds it unlikely that, of all the places you could go, two conspirators would choose to conspire in a room full of microphones in one of the most guarded buildings in the world, and do so in a language few people but Silvia would understand. I find it pretty unlikely, too, and of all the things the movie endeavors to explain it never quite sells that single inciting incident.
He thinks she is lying about something, and she is, and so the question is – what does she know about Zuwanie’s enemies that she’s not telling, and why? This requires Kidman to behave in all sorts of contradictory ways, and I wonder if the movie’s biggest problem is that she is in it at all.
She’s given a few performances that I have really admired, but more often than not her own version of acting exactitude looks like trying with great intensity to show us how hard it is to do what she is doing. With her look-how-hard-I-studied African accent and nearly immobile face (she has little left but her eyelids to emote with), it’s hard enough to find something in her to empathize with. But when so much about her history and motives are kept secret it becomes nearly impossible, and we are left wondering why the movie has thrust her forward as our protagonist.
Penn’s Secret Service agent would have served the movie much better in the central role, as we could have plugged more fully into his desperate race to unravel everyone’s motives and understand her agenda. In one frightening and tense set piece, we watch as Secret Service agents around town find, to their bewilderment, that all of the subjects they have been tailing have converged on the same downtown city bus, even though none of them have met before. Keller and his quietly-supportive partner Woods (an impressive dressed-down turn from Catherine Keener) stand impotently by their walkie-talkies, sure something terrible is about to happen but with only seconds to figure out what it is and issue orders.
Because Kidman is the bigger star, The Interpreter is contorted out of its most effective form so that audiences can watch her be threatened and frightened and determined and pretty. There are also long stretches where she and Penn get to debate the merits of the U.N. and diplomacy versus force, punishment versus forgiveness. These are conversations with an important place in this world, but these characters often seem to find them more interesting than, well, the looming assassination threat against a head of state. Maybe permission to shoot in the building came at a price.
Pollack whips up some great scenes out of it all – Zuwanie’s arrival as choreographed by the security detail crackles with verisimilitude, and I liked subtle touches like the rainbow of nationalities and accents Keller has to navigate among the U.N.’s staffers. It gives The Interpreter heft and care a young director would have ignored. But even a filmmaker of his skill, and an actor of Sean Penn’s chameleonic gifts, cannot hide the miscalculations that skunk its chances of being a truly first-rate piece of grown-up cinematic intrigue.