The Interpreter: 2005, dir. Sydney Pollack. Seen at Alamo Lake Creek (April 23).
I wasn’t all that wild to see The Interpreter. I’d read reviews that were lukewarm at best about it. I heard that it was disappointing, slow, predictable, badly cast, and silly.
I was pleasantly surprised. The Interpreter is a solidly entertaining little thriller with a good cast, well-paced and not at all dull or irritating.
It is true that there are no major surprises, and that the movie adds nothing new or innovative to the action/suspense genre, but that’s all right. Every film cannot be innovative. The Interpreter still provided us with a good afternoon’s enjoyment.
Normally I am not very fond of Nicole Kidman (although I am one of the dozen or so people who liked her in The Stepford Wives) and I can’t stand Sean Penn. I am happy to say that they did not annoy me one single bit, which is saying a lot. I do wish Nicole’s character had a better haircut; she spent the entire movie pushing her hair out of her face, poor thing.
The big hook for The Interpreter is that it is the first film to be shot in the United Nations building. This may be one reason why some people were disappointed. Perhaps we all expected a mysterious atmosphere with lots of twisty corridors and secret entrances and Hitchcockian interiors. (He didn’t get to use the real UN for North by Northwest, not that it mattered a bit.) It doesn’t seem to matter that the film was shot in the actual UN building. You could have built a set with a big auditorium and some small rooms for translators and no one would have missed a thing.
(When I went to Vegas last year, I was disappointed to realize that the Bellagio sets constructed for Ocean’s Eleven looked so much better than the actual Bellagio. It was such a letdown. But I guess that’s movie magic for you.)
Nicole Kidman has the title role in The Interpreter; her character is from S. Africa and knows some obscure African dialects. When she overhears someone planning something nefarious in this obscure language, suddenly the spotlight is on her. Is she telling the truth? We know she is, but the Secret Service agent played by Sean Penn is skeptical. Who are these mysterious men she is emailing and meeting in odd places? Who is working for whom? Will there be an assassination attempt? You get the idea.
I particularly enjoyed Catherine Keener as Sean Penn’s partner in the Secret Service, the caring-yet-wisecracking partner who gets all the best lines in the movie. She reminded me a bit of Allison Janney on The West Wing but that wasn’t a bad thing.
Also, nice use of Lyle Lovett’s “If I Had a Boat,” which actually made me like Sean Penn’s character a little more.
Scott Frank was one of the three screenwriters credited for The Interpreter. He also adapted Out of Sight and Get Shorty, two films I like a lot.
I do wish Sydney Pollack would go back to directing comedies like Tootsie and even the remake of Sabrina (which I like better than the original, which is practically sacrilege on my part). He does a very capable job of directing The Interpreter, but I think he is more than capable with comedies.
One last thought: I read an excerpt of Roger Ebert’s review of this movie, in which he questioned why the main character is white. Yes, many white people live in S. Africa, but why should this particular character be white? He kept thinking Angela Basset would be a better choice. I admit I wondered that myself during the movie. There is one small plot element hinging on the fact that Nicole Kidman’s character had to make a sacrifice because of her race, but I think that could have been altered slightly without harming the film. Was it a casting problem—that they wanted someone like Sean Penn in the male lead role, and didn’t want to “upset” people with interracial romance? Was the decision made so the movie appealed to a certain audience? I have no idea, and I suspect I will never really know, but it is something odd to ponder.
There is an interesting article about this movie in a recent Entertainment Weekly that addresses your question about Nicole Kidman’s casting. (If that link is restricted to EW subscribers only, let me know, and I’ll email the text to you.) Here’s the relevant paragraph:
“Considering that the Silvia Broome character is, after all, an African expatriate, did anyone consider, say, Halle Berry? Apparently not, since Randolph’s initial script was pointedly about a white translator coming to the U.N. as a sort of personal therapy after leaving the war-torn African country where she was born to a white English mother and a white African father. ‘I chose a white African because I felt that’s a story that really hasn’t been told,’ says Randolph. ‘I think we’ve historically dismissed white Africans as racists. And I wanted to portray someone who loved her country, felt an intimate connection to it, but didn’t happen to be black. I never really worried about it that much.’ Neither did Pollack, who says, ‘I didn’t feel this is a picture in which the whites are superior to the blacks. I didn’t feel I was going to get attacked for that, but we’ll see. Maybe I will.’ ”
Apparently Naomi Watts was also under early consideration for the lead role.
“Considering that the Silvia Broome character is, after all, an African expatriate, did anyone consider, say, Halle Berry? Apparently not, since Randolph’s initial script was pointedly about a white translator coming to the U.N. as a sort of personal therapy after leaving the war-torn African country where she was born to a white English mother and a white African father. ‘I chose a white African because I felt that’s a story that really hasn’t been told,’ says Randolph. ‘I think we’ve historically dismissed white Africans as racists. And I wanted to portray someone who loved her country, felt an intimate connection to it, but didn’t happen to be black. I never really worried about it that much.’ Neither did Pollack, who says, ‘I didn’t feel this is a picture in which the whites are superior to the blacks. I didn’t feel I was going to get attacked for that, but we’ll see. Maybe I will.’ ”
WHAT A BUNCH OF BULLSHIT!
Catherine Keener being a wise-ass and one of my favorite Lyle Lovett songs?! Now I’m definitely seeing this movie!!
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