**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn, Catherine Keener, Sydney Pollack, Yvan Attal, Jesper Christensen, and George Harris
Directed by Sydney Pollack & written by Martin Stellman, Brian Ward, Charles Randolph, Scott Frank, and Steve Zaillian
2005
128 min PG13
With the success of indie films like “Hotel Rwanda” and “Moolaade,” it’s apparent that there’s an audience for watching Africans suffer. Mainstream Hollywood has responded to this market in its typical fashion: by making a thriller about white people. In this case, a UN translator with a shady past overhears an assassination plot and becomes the center of a conspiracy. The target of the assassins is a once-progressive African liberator who has become a genocidal dictator. For an illustration of this transition, see Woody Allen’s “Bananas,” in which the leftist revolutionary, now victorious, announces that underwear will be worn on the outside to ensure its cleanliness and that “all girls under 15 are now 15.”
Not surprisingly, the parts that Hollywood is used to—the thriller, the procedural, the explosions, the B movie stuff—work pretty well. The deadly encounter on the bus is surprisingly effective, and the shooting in the interpreter’s apartment is a clever use of handguns and a PG13 rating. There’s a David Mamet-lite flavor to the Secret Service goings-on: the flashing lights, the clipped, necessary-dialogue-only, the discussion of where to shoot a guy so that he won’t detonate a dead man’s switch. The crispness of the talking is probably the work of reliable screenwriters Steve Zaillian (“Hannibal”) and Scott Frank (“Minority Report”). The slimmed-down approach to dialogue works well in a movie called “The Interpreter:” the agent (Sean Penn) and the interpreter (Nicole Kidman) get caught up in several word games (“gone” vs. “dead,” for instance).
The stuff having to do with international politics and all that—the A movie aspects—may work in the broad strokes, but is not exactly inspiring. Africa and the UN are more of a flavor, added to standard material, than subject matter. Kidman’s interpreter could just as easily have come from any war-torn part of the world or rough neighborhood. The cliché of her and the cop “becoming involved” is mostly avoided, possibly because Penn’s Secret Service partner is Catherine Keener. That’s what I’m talking about.
I found Penn’s cop refreshingly unmannered: his main method of interrogation is to stare at Kidman in a resigned, weary manner, and to cock his head to one side when he know she’s lying. He’s an uncluttered, straightforward professional. Kidman is adequate, which, Oscar or not, is mostly all she ever is. Why her character is a white African instead of a black one is open to all manner of, well, interpretation. Pollack has some fun with out-of-focus shots, but for the most part his direction is clean, with low, ominous horns during the right moments. It’s as if he has uncritically translated the style, as well as the content, of a too-serious trash airport novel directly to the screen.
Finished Thursday, June 16th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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