| TALADRO mortal. Doods boring. Alesaggio mortale. Todliches Bohren. Dodlig langtrakig. In any language you care to mangle, The Interpreter (12, seen at Dunfermline Odeon) is DEADLY BORING, writes Phil Weir.
It’s a Mickey Finn of a movie — a knockout-potion motion picture. Wherever it plays, cinema audiences will fall into a deep slumber, like the garrison in Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Show it to a fish, it will grow eyelids, just to shut it out. Show it to a blind man and he’ll wish he was deaf too. And show it to Sauron’s huge red, unblinking, all-seeing peeper atop his stern tower of Barad-dur and the fiery oculus will clang shut until further notice, approaching hobbits or no approaching hobbits.
Which is all kind of surprising as the film stars big guns Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn — and is directed by Sydney Pollack, who, on far better days, too long ago, brought us They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Three Days Of The Condor and Tootsie.
Plus, the well-intentioned plot, tackling topical African issues, is nothing if not rooted in the real world. There’s more than a whiff of Mugabe and Zimbabwe about this tale, if you ask me.
Silvia Broome (Kidman) is a translator at the United Nations complex in New York. Her home country, a fictitious one, is the volatile African republic of Matobo, where the native tongue is the equally bogus tribal lingo of Ku.
Late one night, she returns to her translator booth to pick up her flute. (A flute is just believable. Kidman is shaped a bit like a flute herself — long and slender. It works. A banjo or bassoon wouldn’t have worked). Pottering about in the booth, Silvia hears, through an open microphone, a whispered conversation in Ku drifting up from the vast, darkened auditorium.
Two men, unseen, are discussing an assassination attempt on the life of Matobo’s President Zuwanie (Earl Cameron) who is shortly to arrive at the UN in a bid to derail a trial he is about to face in The Hague concerning war crimes, genocide, etc. Before fleeing the building with her dynamite information, Silvia stupidly manages to put on the light on in her booth, thus identifying herself to the bad guys skulking below her window.
Fearing for her own life and concerned over the impending ‘hit’, even though Zuwanie is a much-loathed dictator, Silvia contacts the secret service and is put in the capable hands of the recently, and conveniently, widowed Tobin Keller (Penn).
A key member of a special unit responsible for the safety of visiting heads of state, Tobin is chiefly interested in protecting Zuwanie, but, learning something of Silvia’s history back in Matobo and her links with the opposition movement, he draws closer to her — partly because he suspects she is involved in the assassination in some way, and partly because there’s a growing emotional attachment.
Supposedly a political thriller, The Interpreter is limp where it should grip, a fault largely down to a plot which delivers 99% chat and only 1% action. Plus, a lot of the droning dialogue, as is the nature of the business of translation, involves the viewer listening to two people talking at once, in different languages, which is not easy on the ears. (This flick will be a doozie to subtitle or dub for foreign audiences).
In the later stages, the storyline becomes all rather confused and hard to follow, although this could have been down to me starting to lose my hold on consciousness.
The setting is also soporific. There’s been much trumpeting about The Interpreter being the first production, ever, where filming has been allowed within the hallowed corridors and halls of the UN building. So what? The bottom line is, famous this building may be, but the architecture looks dated and bland and has about as many points of interest as a provincial airport terminal erected in the 1960s.
But, surely, Kidman and Penn are a pairing to behold, I hear you ask. What’s the opposite of chemistry? Well they have it here. She is insipid and serious most of the time, he looks pained all of the time, and romance is never allowed to get between her seriousness and his pain.
Despite her linguistic gymnastics with the speaking of Ku, on this showing, Kidman looks like a very ordinary actress — which I reckon she is, so her performance came as no surprise. However, I feel sorry for Penn. He’s one of the giants of modern screen acting, but he’s going to have to doctor his CV to erase this performance. His judgment must have been on vacation on the day he read the script. Tobin or not Tobin? That should have been the question he asked himself. And the answer? “Definitely not Tobin.”
VERDICT: One tall flautist, one long fault list.
One star |
