Reviewed by Peter Veugelaers © 2005
- Take a pot shot but be warned.

   The political thriller resurfaces from Hollywood in the aftermath of millennium angst surrounding terrorism. The Interpreter, and last year’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate, has a superbly edited scene of terror in New York and is the latest answer to American conspiracy plots of the 1970s when the Watergate scandal embroiled guilty politicians with swear when the controversial Vietnam War was ending, dividing the United States.

 National security, injustice and ethnic cleansing in Africa are the emotive touchstones to believe in Director Sydney Pollock’s latest effort after his last, Random Hearts (1999).

 The Interpreter is a thriller, like Pollock’s well received Three Days of the Condor, and an engaging and suspenseful one with its occasional effectively taut set pieces, and is also indignant about the movie’s political situation with off-putting righteous platitudes. The two do not mix comfortably.

 This is about an African dictator, a once idealist who twists his political philosophy into a chance for using power with violence. He is going to be assassinated when delivering a speech to the United Nations, at least according to African-born UN translator Sylvia Broome, played by Nichole Kidman, who overhears the plot. A CIA agent (Sean Penn) is assigned to investigate her and does not believe Broome’s story – is her motive for working at the UN because she believes in UN ideals or is she conviennatly being orchestrated in the conspiracy?

 Penn and Kidman get to spar off one another and deliver solid performances. Kidman is tense and says profundities like, “vengeance is the worst form of grief”, while Penn is understated, he crescendos his emotional peaks towards the end.

 While Penn’s Tobin Keller is recovering from his wife’s fatal auto accident, the human side of the movie is in seeing Keller heal in his relationship with Broome, who offers some home brewed advice dished out of her own experience: she is also grieving over her long-lost brother so the point of contact with Keller is further deepened.

 The similarities between the movie’s dictator and Robert Mugabe are glaring. If a parable of such, or just a passing sermon about the injustices of dictatorship, The Interpreter is sanctimonious as it appears and plays to be other than a thriller, unlike Alfred Hitchcock’s skill in delivering a suspenser without a hint of being a bleeding heart. This movie is an off-kilter mix of the intent of the socially concerned documentary film maker and the Hollywood thrill machine.

 The Interpreter is salvaged by its merits but weakened by its self importance which manifests in contrivance of scenes and storyline, which does not ring true, a predictability of plot, and a talkative tendency of much ado about unmemorable nothing, where agents and officials get to speak about apparently important security and conspiracy details which might be memorable if only for the concentration it unnecessarily requires for the viewer. This complex and sophisticated thriller looks and sounds good but is not as impacting and involving as it makes out to be.