The Interpreter
Last week when I was in Detroit, I saw The Interpreter with Shira. Each of us committed to writing a piece about it. This is mine.
The Interpreter
★★★★☆
The Interpreter is an odd movie to have to write a review for because it needs to be come at from two aspects. The first aspect of the movie is that of a thriller. The second aspect of the movie is far more subtle and unusual.
(mild spoilers ahead)
Nicole Kidman stars as a UN interpreter who overhears a plot to assassinate a foreign leader who is about to be referred to the ICC for prosecution. Since the plot is to kill him while he gives a speech at the UN, a Secret Service agent for protection of foreign dignitaries (Sean Penn) is called in. Can the assassination plot be foiled? And how does the murky history of the interpreter fit in?
The basic moral question is, of course, whether the plot should be foiled. After all, this is a leader who's responsible for the deaths of thousands. I can see a decent case on both sides of the argument, but the film doesn't deal with the issue at all.
Kidman and Penn are solid actors, and deal with the roles pretty well. Kidman dons a where-is-that-from English accent, and plays a pretty stolid character, which is reasonable based on her character's history. Penn's character recently lost a wife, and he plays far more emotional than Kidman. But that makes sense.
The plot is more important here. How does the movie play as a thriller? Pretty well. Except for some ridiculous liberal stops along the way (I hate to sound like some conservative pundit here, but forcing a dictator to read a book at gunpoint?), the movie is reasonably-well plotted. It doesn't show its hand as to where the characters are going, and it's a refreshing change from the majority of what's typical.
But the setting is a bit odd. Granted, it's set in New York City, and given that it was filmed there, it has a very solid anchor in reality, an important quality when it comes to a thriller. But as soon as it comes to the UN, the film veers off into fantasy-land.
The whole plot of the film revolves around an assassination attempt on a corrupt leader who is about to be referred by the UN to the ICC. We see speech after speech set in the UN denouncing terrorism and proclaiming human freedom. At the screening Shira and I went to, there were individuals in the audience who were laughing at all of the movie trailers (you know the type) and who were laughing at some of the tensest moments in the film. However, I was laughing at the lines in the film that dealt with the UN taking any sort of action. The UN? Taking action? Tell me that the UN has done anything about the slaughter and genocide in the Sudan in real life, and I'll laugh at you too.
When you contrast the reality of the UN (the Commission on Human Rights debacle, etc.) with the fictionalized version in the movie, it's severely unsettling to the foundation of the film. Who wants to set a movie on a ridiculously-incorrect envisioning of a major plot element? I was about to rate the movie lower when I realized what Sydney Pollack was doing.
If you watch the ending of the film, you have several beautiful, sweeping shots of the island of Manhattan, panning around, carefully framing the UN building over and over. And then it hit me: Pollack is in love with the UN. This film is his paean, his ode to the UN. But then I realized that it couldn't be that. If that were to be the case, it would have to be at least reasonably accurate. Can a film pay homage to an institution when it fictionalizes the institution to the point where it no longer bears any resemblance to reality?
The answer finally came from my past, from an English teacher I had for Intermediate Composition in college. “What makes porn?” she would ask. “Porn aimed at men involves depictions of women as men wish they were, but not as they are. What's the equivalent for women? Romance novels. They portray men as women wish them to be, and just as men drift off into fantasy over their fictionalized women, so do the women over their false images of men.”
And that's what this is. This is Pollack's wet dream of how he sees the UN. He sees it as taking a strong stance for what's right in this world. He sees it as a bastion of human rights and of freedoms. And he made a soft-core porn film about it. His story, while telling the thrilling tale of an interpreter and her Secret Service protector, also tells the autobiographical tale of a man and his beloved UN. And thus, the swooping ending scenes, in which the camera makes tender love to the UN building, falls neatly into place.
You can't rank a romance novel by how much it adheres to reality. The two halves of the film, the thriller and the porn, are both credible efforts by a talented director. Thus I bestow this film with my rating of four stars.