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Movie Review
Decoding "The Interpreter"
A Movie Review by Susan Frome
The opening of "Condor" was so well done with Mr. Redford working for an undercover intelligence agency where employees read everything in print to look for hidden messages that may have some significant covert meaning. He goes out to get lunch for his colleagues and returns to find everyone murdered. We have seen the others mown down by men with AK47s while Mr. Redford was out. Baffled, Mr. Redford must go into hiding immediately. Now this is a strong narrative setup as well as being violent. The rest of the movie is a chase with twists and turns, suspense, good timing, and a love story with Dunaway as an unwitting accomplice. Mr. Pollack was on top of his form.
In "The Interpreter" the opening is strong and shocking as well. In a fictional African country, Matobo, two white men and a black man drive across the somewhat familiar landscape in a jeep, rushing to a meeting with government representatives, hopefully to get together to stop the violence going on in their country. They pull up in front of a run-down soccer stadium; one white man, a news-photographer, is told to stay in the jeep while the other two go inside. They meet some young teenage boys playing soccer, who give them directions where to go to find the victims of a massacre. The white and black man discover the atrocities and, as they are about to leave, are suddenly followed by the boys who open fire on them with AK47s. The white man says some forgiving words to the boys before he dies.
There really are similarities between these two opening scenes. People are behaving normally, they are suddenly tricked, and then violently killed. "Condor" keeps up the pace after that and we never lose track or interest. "The Interpreter" cannot meet these qualities. (There is only one other scene that matches its first scene and that is a suspenseful moment on a bus with a possible assasin.) The rest of the movie focuses on Ms. Kidman's character, Silvia, an interpreter at the United Nations, and on Mr. Penn's character, Tobin, a Secret Service agent, who tries to protect her even as he suspects her of being involved in a possible crime. That crime that may happen is overheard by Silvia through earphones in the interpreters' section after hours. She hears two men talking about assassinating the leader of Matobo, Dr. Zuwanie (Earl Cameron). The leader/dictator is expected to come to the United Nations to give a speech, defending his actions which many have called genocide. It is during his address that the assassination will take place.
The two men have spotted Silvia and the chase is on. But there are so many complications about Silvia, her brother (the one killed in the stadium), her politics (since she is from Matobo and the rest of her family had been killed, too), Dr. Zuwanie (who was once her hero), her relationship to Tobin, his back-story, the news-photographer's guilt and suicide, and on and on. It's not worth the work to figure all that out. One of the hardest things to put up with is Ms. Kidman's hair - sections hanging down in front of her eyes, or shielding half her face. What is the point here? Distraction? And what would be the point of that?
The only other scene that measures up to Mr. Pollackk's "Condor" is, again, on a bus in New York City. Silvia has met up with one of Zuwanie's rivals to get him to help find her brother. They sit across the aisle on the crowded bus surrounded by plainclothes men, the rival's security guards, and the killer/assassin. Most are seated almost next to each other. All are trying to look innocent but all know who each other are. Silvia finally gets up to leave; a woman notices that a man (the killer) has left the bus, too, and has forgotten his lunch, a brown bag on the floor. Flashes of editing jump from face to face as the bus blows up. It's a well directed scene.
Sadly, though, the story never brings us close to the serious problems of Africa, of the countries there like Matobo. This is just a slick job with hearts in the wrong places. After all, what is it all about? The love story? The Assassination? Africa? The life story of a white girl brought up in a fictional country? Her politics? Her lifestyle? Her hair?
If you want a real story about real African people and their sufferings, see "Hotel Rawanda" - a fine movie that focuses on real issues. It's been a long time since a good thriller lit up the screen, and thus Sydney Pollack's new movie "The Interpreter" was billed as the "most anticipated" thriller of the year. First of all Mr. Pollack is a respected director having brought us "Three Days of the Condor" in 1975, a well-written, well acted, well directed thriller if ever there was one. Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway starred there, while here we have Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, neither one anywhere near as good as the former twosome.
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