My friend Daisy, an enthusiastic but discriminating cinema fan, has a way of summing up her movie-going experiences with a succinct take, and so it was as we exited the preview screening of THE INTERPRETER. It almost seemed, she opined, as though something was on the verge of happening. Alas, director Sydney Pollack’s lugubrious pacing and a leaden performance by Nicole Kidman sank any chance of livening things up.
Kidman is Silvia Broome, the interpreter of the title, a white African ex-pat who late one night in a translation booth where she plies her trace overhears a conversation that will cause her much grief in the days to come. It’s about a plot to assassinate someone, but she’s not sure whom (a plot hole a mile wide and then some), and so, even though she’s being stalked by mysterious men driving big cars with malicious intent, she doesn’t tell anyone right away. Once she does, she’s faced with Tobin Keller (Sean Penn), a special agent assigned to protect U.N. diplomats, and his caustic partner, Dot Woods (Catherine Keener). She’s also faced with an array of politicos, diplomats, and security folk who don’t believe her story, but can’t really come up with a good reason for her to have made something like this up. For a while, the film coasts along pondering who is telling the truth, who is lying, and who should take whom seriously. By the time things are settled, as far as whether or not there is an assassination plot, the audience has moved on to other things.
Of course, with a thriller full of murderous intent and political intrigue, it’s important to have clues and twists unfold gradually. Alas, Pollack, who pops up as Penn’s boss, has confused subtle with muddled and so the film inhabits that distinctly unsatisfying middle ground between complex and convoluted. An insistent cross-cutting at the beginning of the film illuminates nothing and irks plenty as the characters flit by. Naturally, there are back stories to be covered, and layers of history that inform the proceedings or just make for a more richly textured character. The problem here is Kidman. She never quite pulls off the persona of a woman of mystery and, perhaps, just a hint of danger. She spends the film heroically trying to furrow a smooth and oddly resistant brow while looking concerned and/or worried and/or sharing some challenging bits of African wisdom dealing with grief and getting on with life.
The peculiar, and putative, bonding of Broome and Keller never ignites, staying somewhere distinctly below tepid on the romance scal and this is because Kidman and Penn have zero chemistry. It’s actually anti-chemistry, as though someone was trying to take the north poles of two magnets and force them together, thereby making the repelling reaction that forces such things apart all the more intense.
Which brings me to those other things. That would mostly be Sean Penn and his bevy of agents. Penn, who may be incapable of giving a performance that is anything less than superb, brings an emotionally wounded world-weariness to the part as well as a keen intelligence. It’s especially apparent when the two Oscar™ winners share the screen and it become obvious that while Kidman is acting the role of the character, Penn is >being< the character. Keener is a guilty pleasure as a walking cheese-grater with an abrasive wit that’s just as sharp commenting on the etiquette of terrorists or saving a diplomat from a lap dancer. The literate script, which includes a consideration of of violence versus diplomacy is certainly timely and also offers tart snippets of dialogue and some of the black humor in which people dealing with death and destruction on a daily basis indulge.
THE INTERPRETER consistently threatens to become a taut intelligent thriller in the classic mold, but never follows through. Instead it builds to a climax that is both derivative and overblown taking the dashed hopes of a patient audience with it. Penn almost, but not quite, makes it worth watching.
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