Friday, 04/22/05

This thriller is open to several interpretations

The Interpreter works well as a thriller set within the walls of the U.N. buildings and on the streets of New York. It's only after you get outside the theater and start reflecting that it feels as though it's on shaky ground.

The problem is black and white — and familiar. Once again, the angst of Africa is explored through a white person's eyes. We're five years into the new millennium. Isn't it time for Hollywood to take a different approach?

Director Sydney Pollack, who visited the continent through the biographical filter of a real-life Caucasian in Out of Africa, focuses on a fictional white character in The Interpreter, which is set primarily in New York but is infused with the politics, conflicts and spirit of Africa.

Nicole Kidman plays Silvia Broome, a woman reared in southern Africa who works as a translator at the United Nations. Silvia overhears a whispered conversation that happens to be in Ku, a language (invented for the movie) particular to her homeland, Matobo (also invented for the movie). Later, she realizes that the threatening words implied an assassination plot against Matobo's black dictator, who is coming to the United Nations in a few days to deflect criticisms of his oppressive regime.

Silvia reports the incident because not only is President Edmund Zuwanie (Earl Cameron) in danger, but also she fears the conspirators realize she heard them and will come after her. Tobin Keller (Sean Penn), a Secret Service agent on foreign-dignitary-protection detail, is skeptical of Silvia's account until an assailant turns up at her apartment.

Keller still has doubts about Silvia, especially when information that suggests she has personal motives for wanting Zuwanie dead surfaces. But he wants and needs to trust her in order to move past a tragedy of his own.

The script at first mimics a police segment from Law & Order. Suddenly, however, the suspense takes hold, and the film achieves an intensity that rarely flags. An undercurrent about a connection between Silvia and Keller adds both texture and implausibility, but fortunately it isn't emphasized.

Kidman's trademark coolness is a perfect fit for the cautious and solitary Silvia. Penn seems out of his element in this mainstream exercise, but his talent for playing tortured individuals helps raise the level of the material.

Pollack's most impressive feat might have been getting permission to shoot inside the actual U.N. buildings. It's fascinating to peer inside the usually off-limits locations, but the idealism that informed their creation stands in hypocritical contrast to some of the organization's greatest failures.

No doubt there are many African whites who feel great affection for their countries and want to see them rise above their post-colonial turmoil. But it seems obvious that there are far more black Africans who have a stake in the continent, and those perspectives have been ignored in films such as Cry Freedom, Out of Africa, Nowhere in Africa, I Dreamed of Africa and now The Interpreter.

While The Interpreter is structurally sound, films don't exist in a vacuum. This one is less than what it could have been because it takes the easy, and more easily marketable, tack of whitewashing African issues.