The Interpreter

Rating PG-13 Genre thriller Starring Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn, Catherine Keener, Max Minghella, Jesper Christensen Directed by Sydney Pollack Publisher Universal Pictures External Links Official Site

The American go-alone invasion of Iraq. The corruption scandal surrounding Secretary General Kofi Annan. John Bolton. The United Nations needs all the good publicity it can get.

That might explain why they opened their doors to director Sydney Pollack to shoot key scenes of his new thriller The Interpreter, a first for the body. Pollack returns the favor by presenting this global hub in the middle of New York with the charge of excitement and importance. In the opening moments (after a prologue set in the fictional African republic of Matobo run by a ruthless military dictator), Pollack efficiently and swiftly introduces a dense array of elements is a handsome introduction. Amidst the apparent chaos of the international human bustle (from the officials on the floor of the chamber to the employees at the lowest levels of the building's fabric) and the feast of languages drifting in and out of the soundtrack, is a sense of order and purpose.

Alas, the United Nations serve as little more than an inspired backdrop for what turns out to be political thriller that, while often gripping, is neither as clever as it tries to be or as politically savvy as pretends to be.

Nicole Kidman does ice-queen duty as UN interpreter Silvia Broome, a cosmopolitan linguist who accidentally overhears a whispered conspiracy that just may be an assassination. She never sees them, but they spot her, yet she doesn't report the incident until the next day, after she learns that Matobo's dictator Zuwanie -- who has been accused of ethnic cleansing and brought up on charges of genocide with the World Court -- is coming to the UN to make a speech.

Coincidence? That's what Secret Service agent Tobin Keller (Sean Penn), a professional cynic who wears suspicion like his rumpled overcoat, wants to know. Silvia is uncommunicative about her past (she grew up in Matobo and is disgusted with Zuwanie) and secretive about her present. She has a tendency to slip away for secret meetings with old friends, apparently oblivious that she's being tailed by persons unknown until one of them shows up outside her window wearing one of her African masks like a voodoo boogeyman. And she has a history of some kind with Zuwanie's head of security (Jesper Christensen), a gaunt, Aryan figure whose calculating manner recalls every cinematic Afrikaner villain of apartheid South Africa.

There are three names on the screenplay (Charles Randolph, Scott Frank, and Steven Zaillian) and two more with story credit. Apparently a lot of hands either tried to pull this convoluted plot together or create more compelling figures out of Silvia and Keller, who manage to become less interesting as their respective pasts are exhumed. If there was ever a romantic suggestion between the two damaged loners, removed from the social world because of the pain of loss, Kidman and Penn do away with it completely. The heat of danger may break down the fence between them momentarily, but back in the calm they retreat into their shells. Unfortunately, the script gives them nothing beyond their dramatic tragic pasts and Pollack doesn't seem interested in filling in the blanks. Even worse, Catherine Keener is wasted as Penn's acerbic partner, a colleague who should be our window into his character but is given almost nothing to do. The three offer intriguing performances but never connect.

Pollack is more focused on the procedure, the investigation, the process, and he weaves some memorable sequences. At one point, with the Secret Service shadowing three different figures, the characters and their American shadows all converge on the same city bus. The editing (by William Steinkamp) is something to behold. He juggles multiple stories, characters, and perspectives, keeping the narrative line impossibly clean while building an old-fashioned sense of tension and suspense by slowly building the tempo, paced by Penn's performance as the Secret Service point man choreographing his agents while pondering the real meaning of the "coincidence." Given such deft work, one has to wonder why Pollack telegraphs the twist so early on and then hammers the clues home in unnecessary flashbacks. There was a time Pollack trusted his audiences to actually watch his movies.

Pollack becomes so caught up in the machinations of plot that he allows the politics to boils down into simplistic mush. "I believe in the United Nations," says Silvia Broome, who proclaims that the only hope for world peace lays in "words and compassion." Yet the sight of Kidman playing the righteous idealist lecturing a black African dictator -- his eyes cast down and face clenched in shame like a child mutely receiving a rebuke -- smacks of paternalistic impertinence. Her anger and betrayal may be genuine, but when Pollack puts it up on the screen as a screed about simple human responsibility, the feeling of colonial judgment over the third world leaves a bad taste in this viewer's mouth.

In Three Days of the Condor Pollack was suspicious of everybody. Here, suspicion is merely a device and the political machinations are easily contained into a world that falls back into simple divides of black and white. The Interpreter steers clear of ambiguity and lacks the moral complexity to match the convolutions of the plot.