reviewed by Brian "The Naked Gun" Felts & Benn "Where's the Humanity?" Farrell
Ok, Nicole Kidman (The Stepford Wives) stars as Silvia, an interpreter at the United Nations
who overhears a conversation between two people talking about the assassination of an African
President who is accused of genocide. Tobin Keller, played by Sean Penn (21 Grams), is a Secret
Service agent assigned to protect foreign dignitaries, and gets to investigate Silvia. Blah, blah,
blah! The plot and outline description can go on for another four hours, but I don't want to torture
myself again, so I will just get to the complaints.
All of the trailers show Sean Penn's character basically saying he thinks Kidman's character is
lying to him. Well, if there was a twist and maybe she was telling the truth but it was hard to
prove, that would be worth investigating, but she was lying from the beginning and everybody in
the audience new it or should have known it. There was no suspense to Kidman's character, you
knew she was hiding something all of the time. Now, there was suspense when you were trying to
figure out what lie she was going to tell Keller. But the movie took way to long to figure out
the obvious.
Nicole Kidman was poorly cast for this movie. It's not her fault since supposedly she did not
read the script before signing on. Her character kills a small kid years before the time that
this movie takes place, Kidman can't pull that kind of character off. There was picture of her
holding a gun and it just was wrong, and then the final scene with her holding the gun to the
bad guys head, um, no. She is a great actress and wonderfully beautiful, but some other actress
should have been cast, not Kidman.
I thought Sean Penn did a good job, but I couldn't figure out why he was in this movie after the
first hour. He doesn't do action movies, at least not now. But once the movie switched to the
whole politics is best served by talking and not the gun, then it made perfect since why he was
in this movie. This was his subtle anti-Iraqi war movie statement. He did a good job but if I
knew what this movie was REALLY about, I would have gone in with a completely different mind set.
I would also like to bitch about Sydney Pollack and his directing. Every scene seemed to last 5
minutes longer than necessary. It was like he was making a statement, putting it in bold, and
italics, and then underlines it. I know the writing has something to do with it but still a
director should know when to edit out the pointless staring that the characters do. Ten seconds
of staring is ok, what seemed like 45 years of staring in the same scene, too much.
Overall, I can't recommend this movie, it is painfully long, Kidman is miscast, and it is not a
suspenseful thriller but a political drama. So if you like long-winded political statements in
a movie, have fun, and bring your hemorrhoid crème.
Brian - the Naked Gun
I felt, in almost every scene, there was at least ONE thing that made me unable to accept the material in "The Interpreter." Whether it was an off choice from an actor, an over emphasized analogy, a response or a simple action, there was always something to keep the picture off center for me.
For the most part, I enjoyed the picture, but not to where I felt good about paying $7.25 to see it. My biggest problem with the picture is, director Sydney Pollack (The Firm, Random Hearts) seemed to have a lack of beats in the picture's lengthier dialogue scenes. Broome and Keller had numerous wordy scenes with so many holes between beats, one could drive a truck through them. For those who are film buffs and not FILMMAKING buffs, a beat is a dialogue, an action or a camera shot, which COMMANDS a viewer's attention, as in they CANNOT look away. A boring discussion can be spiced up with beats, blocking--the movements of actors in a scene--and an actor's response. However, Pollack seemed to allow dialogue scenes to go unchecked. Maybe that's what directors deal with when working with TWO Academy Award® winning actors. Anyways, because of this lack of beats, the pacing of the film's "drama" was very long and, as Brian stated, painful. I also had a couple of believability problems with the picture, mostly in character backstories. As Brian also said, I couldn't see Kidman carrying a gun and shooting a small child in the child either. I didn't buy it. I also didn't buy Broome getting hired by the United Nations, after an initial background check, which should've uncovered her youth as a revolutionary, especially when she supposedly had a love affair with one of Mottaba's revolutionary leaders. I think U.N. investigators would've easily found that out about her and NOT hired her in the first place, labeling her a risk. I thought the backstory on Penn's character was fine, a little cliched. Keller lost a loved one and began to fill the emptiness inside him with Broome. That's all fine, but as Brian infers, it's not the usual material for what was marketed as an action picture. Penn's performance was also fine. A little non-dynamic, unlike his work in "Mystic River," but for this story, and the pain his character was carrying, it worked okay. Best thing I liked most about the picture was the production design by Jon Hutman (Something's Gotta Give). No other picture I've seen really made me "feel" the inside of the United Nations building in New York. It was an exciting setting. I also thought Pollack's pacing of the bus bomb sequence was masterful. It was exciting, intense and of course sad. It was the picture's best sequence. However, the run-on climax, or anti-climax I should say, didn't even come close to living up to the rest of the picture. With the three screenwriters attached to this picture, being Charles Randolph (The Life of David Gale), Academy Award®
nominee Scott Frank (Minority Report) and Oscar® winner Steve Zaillian (Schindler's List), I would've thought this picture's
nuts and bolts would've been screwed in tighter. I was wrong, and it seems additional script/film editing
was badly needed. I enjoyed "The Interpreter" more than Brian, but I can't advise seeing it in the theatres. It's predictable and slow, and it would probably make a better home DVD rental. Benn - Where's the Humanity?
So after the first hour of the movie I kept asking myself why Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn are in
this suspenseful, detective, who done it. However, 15 hours later when the movie FINALLY ended,
I realized that this movie was a political drama and both Kidman and Penn were perfect for this
yawner.