Agent Tobin Keller hews to honed hunches the way cops often do in movies. In contrast, interpreter Silvia Broome has trained herself to believe in the possibility of words and the truth of human voices, for they are the tools of diplomacy.
Nicole Kidman plays a United Nations translator from a fictitious African country called Matobo, a nation plunged by its liberator- turned-tyrant into a bloodbath of ethnic cleansing.
As a result of a series of somewhat clunky plot devices, Broome finds herself one night in the control booth above the U.N. General Assembly floor. When she overhears a plot to assassinate Matobo’s leader, Edmond Zuwanie – who is soon to deliver a speech at the U.N – she becomes suspect and target.
Keller (Sean Penn) and partner Dot Woods
(Catherine Keener, proving again how much she can wring from scant material) are Secret Service agents tasked with the protection of foreign dignitaries. Keller, struggling with the finality of the end of his marriage, is suspicious and then increasingly protective of the pale beauty who is obviously hiding something. But what?
What exactly is her relationship to the two men – one black, one white – entering a ruined soccer stadium at the beginning of the film? How is it that she was the one to hear a clandestine plot delivered in Ku, a sparsely spoken African dialect?
Laid out this way, Sydney Pollack’s political thriller seems fairly common. And for all its ripped-from the- headlines concerns (genocide, the U.N.’s value, stateside acts of terrorism), it isn’t nearly as incisive as the director’s “Three Days of the Condor’ (1975) or as taut an entertainment as “The Firm’ (1993). Yet when the film trusts the audience, “The Interpreter’ is an intriguing outing.
This trust is at its best when Keller grills Broome about Matobo’s leader. She has good reason to want him not merely “gone,’ as she once told Tobin, but dead. He asks how she feels about the leader. Her reply: “I feel disappointment.’
“That’s a lover’s word,’ he says.
Exactly.
And this is where “The Interpreter’ displays a quiet intelligence. Broome and the other citizens of Matobo are the jilted lovers of a leader who promised liberty. Matobo may be a made-up country somewhere in southern Africa, but its struggle for liberation, followed by its plight of brutal infighting, has plenty of models.
This nugget of dialogue is just one example of how Pollack and his trio of prestige screenwriters (Scott Frank, Steven Zaillian and Charles Randolph) deliver their thriller’s better moments not as sights but as sounds, as words.
That does not mean the movie is without action. The visceral set-piece of “The Interpreter’ cross-cuts scenes of agents trailing Broome, an assassin and an exiled Matobo rebel agitating from Brooklyn.
It is not simply the convergence of all three on a New York City bus that pumps the adrenaline. It’s Pollack’s attention to each agent’s expression as he registers the chaotic enormity of the situation.
Not quite broken by loss, Penn plays Keller with a permanently bowed head. But Kidman is the one with the best lines.
“Vengeance is a lazy form of grief,’ Broome tells Keller at one point. “The Intrepreter’ wrestles with notions of truth and reconciliation, issues that have become the hard work of African communities from Rwanda to South Africa.
Still, there are flaws in this film’s compassionate undertaking. Most difficult to overcome is the need of “The Interpreter’ to tease us with a possible love connection between the leads.
To do this, the movie implies an equivalency between Broome’s and Keller’s grief.
This is both generous and myopic: Charitable because “The Intepreter’ argues for the possibility and necessity of empathy. But it makes more than it should of the kinship between the arbitrary cruelty of a tragic accident and the intentional viciousness of genocide. For a movie of some vision, that’s shortsighted.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
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“The Interpreter’
PG-13 for violence, some sexual content and brief strong language|2 hours, 15 minutes| POLITICAL THRILLER|Directed by Sydney Pollack; written by Charles Randolph, Scott Frank and Steven Zaillian; photography by Darius Khondji; starring Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn, Catherine Keener, Jesper Christensen, Yvan Attal |Opens today at area theaters
