Displaying his familiar competence
and intelligence, Sydney Pollack’s new movie, The Interpreter, also demonstrates an appropriate connection to
contemporary history. Like his Three Days
of the Condor of 1975, the picture addresses, through its slick, exciting
surface action, a most plausible and disquieting international reality,
touching on some of the peculiar tensions of our time. It also cleverly inverts
some of the typical patterns of one of the most relevant genres for this
troubled age, the political thriller.
The movie presents a situation
familiar to any student of the cinema or fan of the form, the chance
involvement of an innocent person, an ordinary citizen, in a sinister and
dangerous conspiracy. Nicole Kidman plays Silvia Broome, a United Nations
interpreter with a specialty in African languages, who spends her days
translating the speeches of foreign delegates into English. Returning to her
translator’s booth one night, she accidentally hears, through an open
microphone on the floor, a plot to assassinate President Zuwanie of the fictional
African nation of Matobo, scheduled to visit New York and speak to the General
Assembly.
She reports her discovery to the
proper authorities at the UN, who turn her and her information over to a
division of the United States Secret Service charged with protecting foreign
heads of state, complicating an apparently random event into a surprising
entanglement of politics and emotion. Neither the UN security people nor Tobin
Keller (Sean Penn), the Secret Service agent who interrogates her, entirely believe
her story.
Their investigation of her background
reveals the tragic history of her previous involvement in the chaotic affairs
of Matobo, including the deaths of her parents and sisters in a landmine
explosion, and eventually, the cold-blooded murder of her brother, which leads
them to question both her veracity and her motivation.
Undergoing the sort of horrific
turmoil that makes it an appropriate pseudonym for Nigeria, Sierra Leone,
Somalia, Rwanda, or any other nation engaged in civil war, tribal butchery, or
simple inhuman tyranny, Matobo resembles far too many countries in the troubled
continent. Its leader, formerly an idealistic rebel against dictatorial
oppression, apparently plans his UN appearance as a public justification of his
slaughter of opponents. His two chief rivals, one of whom lives in exile in
Brooklyn, provide the prime suspects for the investigation of the alleged
assassination and presumably the source of Kidman’s story.
Although the plot should proceed in
part as a more or less traditional unfolding of the methods set in motion to
protect the visiting president, with the usual frantic race against time, the
picture in a sense moves backward, gradually revealing Kidman’s history and the
parallel history of Matobo. The retrospective quality of the narrative, oddly,
generates almost as much suspense as the more familiar business of the Secret
Service’s procedures in investigating Kidman, and their gradual accumulation of
knowledge of her past — which they acquire along with the audience
—influences both their changing attitudes toward her and the development of
the assassination plot. The Service actually suspects the interpreter of some
complicity in the ostensibly chance occurrence she reports, and in a sense,
they ultimately turn out to be both right and wrong.
The close watch the Secret Service
maintains on Silvia Broome, not surprisingly, creates something of a
relationship between the interpreter and Agent Kidder, who nurses his own
personal sorrow over the death of his wife. Their shared sense of grief and
their acknowledged mutual attraction never really attain more than a kind of
heightened emotional sensitivity and a tacit acknowledgment of some possible
connection.
Her lovely fragility contrasts nicely
with his bruised toughness and together they reach a genuinely touching, mostly
unspoken understanding of each other, and a bittersweet sense of loss even
without an actual bond.
The main thriller plot marches along
with a nice sense of pacing, tightening the tension as the time of the
presidential visit approaches and the Secret Service encounters numerous
obstacles to their efforts, not the least of them Silvia Broome’s own
uncooperative attitude. As in The Three
Days of the Condor, the director uses the New York location, and in this
case the United Nations itself, with great skill, establishing an atmosphere of
authenticity that nicely buttresses the familiar melodrama and sensationalism
of the form.
Obeying the demands of its
illustrious and entertaining genre and therefore creating a considerable
quantity of excitement, The Interpreter achieves a most successful combination of action, character, and theme,
suggesting again the contemporary relevance of the thriller for this or any
other time.
The Interpreter, starring Nicole
Kidman, Sean Penn; directed by Sydney Pollack. Cinemark Tinseltown, Loews Webster, Pittsford Plaza Cinema, Regal
Culver Ridge, Regal Eastview, Regal Greece Ridge, Regal Henrietta
This article appears in Apr 27 – May 3, 2005.
