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The Interpreter Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: PG-13 (for violence, some sexual content, and brief strong language) Theater release: April 22, 2005 by Universal Pictures Directed by: Sydney Pollack Runtime: 1 hour 30 minutes Cast: Nicole Kidman (Silvia Broome), Sean Penn (Tobin Keller), Catherine Keener (Dot Woods), Christensen (Nils Lud), Earl Cameron (Zuwanie) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Last year, David L. Robb wrote a book called Operation Hollywood, in which he exposed how movie studios eager to borrow real military hardware for their explosive entertainments—not just from the Pentagon but from foreign armies, as well—will gladly make changes to their scripts in order to cast those nations and their fighting forces in a positive light. Naturally, when the army brass participate in the making of a film, they are looking at the film not as art but as a potential recruiting device, and the films made with their co-operation can safely be regarded as at least a mild form of propaganda.

Nicole Kidman as Silvia Broome

As with the Pentagon, so with the United Nations. Although the UN building is over 50 years old, no film has ever been shot there before, despite requests from revered auteurs like Alfred Hitchcock. The powers that be have made an exception, however, for Sydney Pollack, whose first directorial effort in several years, The Interpreter, is now the first movie ever filmed in that building's General Assembly Hall and various other hallowed places. And as we might expect, the film is loaded with messages, some less subtle than others.

This, no doubt, is what attracted the increasingly self-serious Sean Penn to the film. Penn can be a remarkably good actor, even if there is something monotonous in the way he goes from one depressingly maudlin role to another, but in recent years he seems to have lost all sense of proportion, whether he is slapping Chris Rock's wrist at the Oscars for making good-natured jokes about Jude Law, or chastising reporters for offending against the very nature of art when they point out the parallels between Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Penn's own The Assassination of Richard Nixon. So to see him slumming in what could otherwise have been another popcorn-pushing conspiracy thriller is something of a shock.

Sean Penn as Secret Service agent Tobin Keller

The dissonance is deepened further by the fact that Penn's co-star is the glamorous Nicole Kidman, who has proved her arty, dramatic acting chops in films like Dogville and The Hours, but here seems to be in The Peacekeeper mode, dodging the odd threat to her life as she helps unravel an international mystery. Watching her, you think less about her performance than you do about the way her hair keeps waving around her face when she goes for a walk, or the way it hangs in front of her eyes, giving them a peekaboo sexiness that is just a little too fetching. You may even begin to feel sorry for the continuity people who had to ensure that her blonde locks fell across her forehead the exact same way every time they shot another take of something as simple as a conversation with Penn. And more than once, you may wonder what on earth these two people are doing in the same movie.

Ah well, at least the differences between these actors do make it easier to believe that their characters would be so naturally at odds with one another that they would have difficulty trusting and understanding each other. Kidman plays Silvia Broome, a French-English interpreter who also knows a rare African dialect spoken by the people of Matobo, a fictitious African country that appears to be based on Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. As if to accentuate how special this film is for getting access to the UN, it begins with a sequence that underscores the building's tight security; when a single metal detector goes on the fritz, everyone is told to evacuate immediately. Silvia leaves a bag behind, and comes back late in the evening to fetch her things. And whilst there, she overhears what sounds like a Matoban plot to kill the despotic leader of that country during his upcoming visit.

Tobin and Silvia on the case—well, sort of

Enter Tobin Keller (Penn) and Dot Woods (Catherine Keener, whose sarcastic asides provide nice comic relief), two U.S. Secret Service agents who are assigned to protect the foreign dignitary when he arrives. (At one point Penn stands behind the Hall's main podium in a shot that would have been ripe for spoofing in Team America: World Police if the latter film had not been made already.) Tobin distrusts Silvia from the beginning, and his suspicions are fuelled by a Matoban ambassador (Lou Ferguson) who sends him evidence that would appear to link Silvia to the rebels of that country; the fact that Silvia makes secret phone calls and sends urgent e-mails to mysterious friends also raises a few alarm bells.

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