April 21, 2005 - The Interpreter, unlike virtually any other film released thus far this year, is an all-around classy affair: director Sydney Pollack helmed more than a few white-knuckle thrillers in his illustrious filmography (among them Three Days of the Condor, Absence of Malice and The Firm); screenwriters Scott Frank (Minority Report) and Steven Zaillian (A Civil Action) are old pros at political mind games; cinematographer Darius Khondji (Panic Room) knows better than almost anybody working how to evoke mood under a midday sun; and of course Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman convey credible intellect with less effort than it takes to raise a skeptical eyebrow. As such, it comes as little surprise that this aggregation of talent makes for a completely captivating cinematic experience; but given its success, one can't help but wonder why so few movies quite so smart, and moreover, so adult, seem to get made these days in Hollywood's dream factories.

Kidman stars as Silvia Broome, an interpreter working at the United Nations who returns to her post one late night only to overhear a plot to kill a visiting African dignitary. Initially hesitant to report the incident, she finally comes clean to the authorities, but quickly finds herself added to the list of suspects – perhaps deservedly, given the litany of secrets she keeps about her background. A secret service agent named Keller (Penn) is assigned to investigate her case, and the two forge an uneasy partnership to draw out the identity of the would-be killers; as they grow closer to one another, more secrets – both private and public – are uncovered, and they discover that what each of them believes will be called into question before the truth can be revealed.

Describing the particulars of the film's plot hardly does justice to its expert execution; reading what I just wrote certainly wouldn't entice me to watch it had I not been assigned to do so. But The Interpreter is a rare example of filmmaking at its most professional, and most effective; take, for example, the film's centerpiece sequence, in which three cat-and-mouse chases converge, explosively, on a city bus. It's the kind of narrative entanglement that David Mamet or Elmore Leonard could conceive while ordering a light lunch, and yet writ large against the backdrop of an evocatively rendered, volatile political background, the editorial choices feel like outrageous betrayals to the audience's sense of common decency: shouldn't we follow this character, whom we know is a 'good guy' and is therefore destined to live? Why not focus on that furtive gesture the 'suspicious' character is making so we know what to expect?

-Universal

Pollack allows us none of the conveniences of modern convention, where all is telegraphed long before the events reach fruition. Rather, he allows us just enough to whet our appetite, and to cultivate a genuine curiosity about not only What Will Happen Next, but more importantly, Where Is All Of This Going?

Meanwhile, Kidman and Penn anchor the script's potential melodrama and transform that familiar formula into moviemaking magic. Penn, second to none, continues to thrill audiences with one great performance after another, and almost tops himself with an Oscar-worthy turn here in this unlikely, summer-movie front runner. The disarray of Keller's life is the stuff over-actors yearn to indulge, but Penn makes his grief palpable without force-feeding anguish down confounded viewers' throats; like with his understated but devastating performance in last December's The Assassination of Richard Nixon, Penn shows us the dimensions of his character's fractured emotional life without having to spell it out. At the same time, Kidman blazes in a comeback performance that forgives all of her recent cinematic transgressions (Cold Mountain, Birth and The Stepford Wives, among others); Broome is one of the most complexly written characters I've seen in movies for months, much less years, and Kidman finds the right notes to play each of them, from frightened peacemaker to razed revolutionary, without sacrificing any of her mystique.

Despite these numerous merits, the question again must be raised why so few of these movies – meaning smart, well-executed, and adult-oriented pictures – are made nowadays. Part of it, one might observe, could be our collective disinterest in stories that are about anything more then ourselves, or anything that requires genuine empathy for our fellow human beings; so frequently our support (or lack thereof) is built upon rhetorical outrage and/or differences of philosophy. Then again, part of it could simply be a result of our expanding desire for 'escapist' entertainment, for movies that coddle our expectations without shaking them, and which satisfy our emotional needs without challenging them first.

-Universal

In all likelihood, this dearth of mature moviemaking can't be attributed to just one or two factors, though it's safe to assume that money is probably among them; but quite honestly, if it takes an Interpreter to start figuring it all out, I'm all for it.

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