FILM: The Interpreter
New Yorker
The new Sydney Pollack film, "The Interpreter," stars Nicole Kidman as Silvia Broome, an employee of the United Nations. Lonely and multilingual, Silvia bears a heavy responsibility: she sits in a booth and translates simultaneously from one tongue to another, fully aware that global war may be triggered if she leaves one of her participles dangling in midair. One night, returning to the booth to pick up her stuff, she overhears a conversation that hints at a dastardly crime. So is her life now in danger? Is she a plant, a threat, or a clue?
The crime in question is the possible slaying of Edmund Zuwanie (Earl Cameron), the president of Matobo-a fictitious African republic, conjured solely for the purposes of this film, although you could be forgiven for allowing the words Zimbabwe and Mugabe, say, to flit across your brain. Zuwanie, once a liberator of his people, has become their scourge, and there are many interested parties who wish him ill. There is even a move to have him indicted for crimes against humanity. Nevertheless, he remains a grizzled head of state, he will shortly arrive at the U.N. to address the General Assembly, and it is the job of the Secret Service-in particular, of Agents Keller (Sean Penn) and Woods (Catherine Keener)-to protect the genocidal gentleman while he is visiting New York.
One presumes that, for Dr. Zuwanie, the quandary is simple: do I feel more safe or less safe in the knowledge that I am being tended by Sean Penn? What lends "The Interpreter" its peculiar froideur is the presence of two such baffled players in the leading roles. Kidman is an icicle, damned if she's going to melt for anybody, while Penn wears the look of a man who has had enough.
All that remains is a series of motions to be gone through, which may explain the dour precision with which he performs his professional task-comically unattracted, at the start, by the statuesque Ms. Broome. He learns that she was raised in Africa (at mournful moments, she still plays a wooden flute), that she knows Matobo well, and that her parents and sister were killed there by a land mine, which could well have turned her into a foe of the Zuwanie regime. As Keller investigates, he draws near, but a hug is as far as he gets; if George Clooney, the human catnip, couldn't even grab a kiss off Kidman in "The Peacemaker," then poor old Penn doesn't stand a chance. "The Interpreter" was devised by a mass movement of writers: screenplay by Charles Randolph, Scott Frank, and Steven Zaillian, from a story by Martin Stellman and Brian Ward, from an original idea by Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, and so forth.
Together, they get down to some serious broth-spoiling, adding sprinkles of subplot whether we like the taste or not. Our first sight of Keller finds him removing his wedding ring; soon afterward, we learn that his wife has not merely left him but died in a car crash, with her lover. Penn is too good an actor, too naturally perturbed, to need this weight of backstory, and the fact that he's still humping it around at the climax, maundering on about grief while there are guns being pointed, pitches the whole thing head first into the risible. I actually felt sorry for Dr. Zuwanie, who looks as if he would rather get blown away than sit through another minute of someone else's therapy. Such, unfortunately, is the pitfall for thrillers that aim to be more literate and grownup than the usual fare: they sometimes forget to thrill.
There are patches of slow murk in "The Interpreter" that cry out for a cleaner edit, and-a big surprise, given that the crew gained unprecedented access from Kofi Annan's officials-we get a disappointingly slim grasp of U.N. life. I can tell you no more now about the layout of the place, or of how interpreters measure out their days, than I could before watching the movie. I hate to say it, but the single U.N. scene in "North by Northwest," for which Hitchcock had to use mockups, delivers a more colorful punch than Pollack's respectful panoramas of the General Assembly. Still, to be fair, there is one part of "The Interpreter" that would, without question, have earned the Master's smile.
All the characters are in different places-one agent is following Silvia, another is tailing a Matoban suspect, and Woods and Keller are in a booby-trapped room. (Catherine Keener, by far the driest deliverer of lines in the movie, looks up at an overhead light strung with explosives and says, "Now, that's just rude." Imagine Celeste Holm packing heat, and you're there.) Gradually, Pollack pulls the figures together, Keller starts to yell into his phone, and calamity opens its maw. It is one of the smartest passages of action, allegro sostenuto, that I have seen for a long while-as neat, indeed, as the infamous bomb-on-a-bus sequence from Hitchcock's "Sabotage," and true to his faith in the revelatory powers of excitement, in what it means to have movies burst against our nerves.
"The Interpreter" is long and tangled, the score is yet another drownout from the thundering James Newton Howard, and the avowed thoughtfulness-about sub-Saharan politics, about the clashing commitments to peace and justice, about the kinship of damaged souls-is at once laudable and vaporous. I thought harder, and more fierily, about Silvia Broome not as she tootled a desert air on her Matoban flute but as she ran for her life from a crowded Brooklyn bus. That is the lingua franca of film, and it needs no translation.
WINE
Had two wonderful bottles of wine this weekend. Try these:
D'ARRY'S Original Shiraz/Grenache (D'ARENBERG)
VINTAGES 942904
TALTARNI Cabernet Sauvignon 2000
VINTAGES 940692
TENNIS
It looks like my favourite tennis player is still on the rise.
MUSIC
Swervedriver was certainly underappreciated in the 90s.
Likewise, The Mountain Goats are an acquired taste. <>
OTHER
An update on "things that are cool".
The strange death of Liberal Canada?
The Economist
SUDDENLY, an abyss has opened up under Paul Martin's minority Liberal government. Only a few weeks ago, Mr Martin's supporters were looking forward with equanimity to the prospect of the prime minister calling an election some time next year to restore their party to the parliamentary majority it enjoyed for more than a decade until last year. Now, Canada is contemplating the possibility of the Conservative opposition forcing a June poll and going on to form a minority government. In due course, say some alarmed federalists, a new attempt by French-speaking Quebec to secede from Canada would follow. All this is the result of the explosive turn taken by the Gomery inquiry. This is looking into the abuse of a C$250m ($200m) scheme to promote federalism in Quebec set up by Jean Chrétien, Mr Martin's predecessor, in the wake of the narrow defeat of the last referendum on secession a decade ago.
Last week, Jean Brault, a Montreal advertising man, told the inquiry that his agency had received C$23.4m for services that included adding Liberal Party workers to his payroll. He also said he had contributed $1.2m to Liberal funds, much of it in cash in brown envelopes or against fake invoices. In other evidence, the inquiry heard claims that a graphic-design firm headed by Jacques Corriveau, a friend of Mr Chrétien and fundraiser for him, received sub-contracts worth $6.7m through the scheme. Judge John Gomery's decision to ban publication of Mr Brault's testimony (some of which is contested) was reversed in part after this was posted on an American website. The effect of the ban was merely to draw more attention to the testimony. The damage to the Liberals showed up in an opinion poll by Ipsos-Reid (see chart). Another poll, by EKOS, put the Conservatives even further ahead of the Liberals, at 36% to 25%. In Quebec, it showed Liberal support having collapsed to 18%, with the separatist Bloc Québécois at 48%.
These polls show the Conservatives level or even ahead in Ontario, a Liberal stronghold. That makes an early election attractive to Stephen Harper, the Conservative leader, as well as to the Bloc. If they combine their forces behind a no-confidence motion, they could outvote the Liberals in the House of Commons.
The Liberal ship is already showing signs of sinking. One of the 133 Liberal MPs this week left the party to sit as an independent. Another 33 Liberals defied Mr Martin and voted with the Conservatives to kill a government bill recognising same-sex marriage. Impatient Tories are urging Mr Harper to engineer a snap election. They argue that the best time for a vote would be late June, after a provincial election in British Columbia, a visit by Queen Elizabeth to western Canada-and the end of Judge Gomery's public hearings. If the polls are right, Mr Harper could expect to win such an election, though the Tories might win only one seat in Quebec.
It would be a close-run thing. Mr Martin, to whom no personal blame has attached over the scandal, remains slightly more trusted than Mr Harper. The polls suggest the leftish New Democrats and Greens would attract more disillusioned Liberals than would the Tories. Tellingly, some 85% of respondents told pollsters they want Mr Gomery to finish his work-his report is due in December-before an election. By then the Liberals may have recovered and Mr Harper's moment might have passed. If he does go for an early election, the big winner could be Gilles Duceppe, the Bloc's leader. Some would expect him to capitalise by leaving federal politics and taking charge of the more powerful Parti Québécois in the province itself. There he could challenge Quebec's clumsy Liberal premier, Jean Charest, and so pose a new threat to Canadian unity. All this is but speculation, but such is the febrile atmosphere in Canada's normally placid capital that it is being taken seriously.
If steroids is cheating, why isn't LASIK surgery?
How is Disney profitable?
Europe has its share of melancholy cities: the citizens of Lisbon take each destructive fire as fate's latest grim joke; Warsaw has been regularly ripped apart by foreign invaders; and it's hard to be cheerful in Trieste or, indeed, Cardiff. But the Istanbullu novelist Orhan Pamuk makes a persuasive, if repetitive, case for his city to be ranked as the most melancholy of all. [perhaps not the best city, then, to start a honeymoon?]
Saw this movie tonight. A little ponderous, heavy-handed, but still good.
New Yorker
The new Sydney Pollack film, "The Interpreter," stars Nicole Kidman as Silvia Broome, an employee of the United Nations. Lonely and multilingual, Silvia bears a heavy responsibility: she sits in a booth and translates simultaneously from one tongue to another, fully aware that global war may be triggered if she leaves one of her participles dangling in midair. One night, returning to the booth to pick up her stuff, she overhears a conversation that hints at a dastardly crime. So is her life now in danger? Is she a plant, a threat, or a clue?
The crime in question is the possible slaying of Edmund Zuwanie (Earl Cameron), the president of Matobo-a fictitious African republic, conjured solely for the purposes of this film, although you could be forgiven for allowing the words Zimbabwe and Mugabe, say, to flit across your brain. Zuwanie, once a liberator of his people, has become their scourge, and there are many interested parties who wish him ill. There is even a move to have him indicted for crimes against humanity. Nevertheless, he remains a grizzled head of state, he will shortly arrive at the U.N. to address the General Assembly, and it is the job of the Secret Service-in particular, of Agents Keller (Sean Penn) and Woods (Catherine Keener)-to protect the genocidal gentleman while he is visiting New York.
One presumes that, for Dr. Zuwanie, the quandary is simple: do I feel more safe or less safe in the knowledge that I am being tended by Sean Penn? What lends "The Interpreter" its peculiar froideur is the presence of two such baffled players in the leading roles. Kidman is an icicle, damned if she's going to melt for anybody, while Penn wears the look of a man who has had enough.
All that remains is a series of motions to be gone through, which may explain the dour precision with which he performs his professional task-comically unattracted, at the start, by the statuesque Ms. Broome. He learns that she was raised in Africa (at mournful moments, she still plays a wooden flute), that she knows Matobo well, and that her parents and sister were killed there by a land mine, which could well have turned her into a foe of the Zuwanie regime. As Keller investigates, he draws near, but a hug is as far as he gets; if George Clooney, the human catnip, couldn't even grab a kiss off Kidman in "The Peacemaker," then poor old Penn doesn't stand a chance. "The Interpreter" was devised by a mass movement of writers: screenplay by Charles Randolph, Scott Frank, and Steven Zaillian, from a story by Martin Stellman and Brian Ward, from an original idea by Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, and so forth.
Together, they get down to some serious broth-spoiling, adding sprinkles of subplot whether we like the taste or not. Our first sight of Keller finds him removing his wedding ring; soon afterward, we learn that his wife has not merely left him but died in a car crash, with her lover. Penn is too good an actor, too naturally perturbed, to need this weight of backstory, and the fact that he's still humping it around at the climax, maundering on about grief while there are guns being pointed, pitches the whole thing head first into the risible. I actually felt sorry for Dr. Zuwanie, who looks as if he would rather get blown away than sit through another minute of someone else's therapy. Such, unfortunately, is the pitfall for thrillers that aim to be more literate and grownup than the usual fare: they sometimes forget to thrill.
There are patches of slow murk in "The Interpreter" that cry out for a cleaner edit, and-a big surprise, given that the crew gained unprecedented access from Kofi Annan's officials-we get a disappointingly slim grasp of U.N. life. I can tell you no more now about the layout of the place, or of how interpreters measure out their days, than I could before watching the movie. I hate to say it, but the single U.N. scene in "North by Northwest," for which Hitchcock had to use mockups, delivers a more colorful punch than Pollack's respectful panoramas of the General Assembly. Still, to be fair, there is one part of "The Interpreter" that would, without question, have earned the Master's smile.
All the characters are in different places-one agent is following Silvia, another is tailing a Matoban suspect, and Woods and Keller are in a booby-trapped room. (Catherine Keener, by far the driest deliverer of lines in the movie, looks up at an overhead light strung with explosives and says, "Now, that's just rude." Imagine Celeste Holm packing heat, and you're there.) Gradually, Pollack pulls the figures together, Keller starts to yell into his phone, and calamity opens its maw. It is one of the smartest passages of action, allegro sostenuto, that I have seen for a long while-as neat, indeed, as the infamous bomb-on-a-bus sequence from Hitchcock's "Sabotage," and true to his faith in the revelatory powers of excitement, in what it means to have movies burst against our nerves.
"The Interpreter" is long and tangled, the score is yet another drownout from the thundering James Newton Howard, and the avowed thoughtfulness-about sub-Saharan politics, about the clashing commitments to peace and justice, about the kinship of damaged souls-is at once laudable and vaporous. I thought harder, and more fierily, about Silvia Broome not as she tootled a desert air on her Matoban flute but as she ran for her life from a crowded Brooklyn bus. That is the lingua franca of film, and it needs no translation.
WINE
Had two wonderful bottles of wine this weekend. Try these:
D'ARRY'S Original Shiraz/Grenache (D'ARENBERG)
VINTAGES 942904
TALTARNI Cabernet Sauvignon 2000
VINTAGES 940692
TENNIS
It looks like my favourite tennis player is still on the rise.
MUSIC
Swervedriver was certainly underappreciated in the 90s.
Likewise, The Mountain Goats are an acquired taste. <>
OTHER
An update on "things that are cool".
The strange death of Liberal Canada?
The Economist
SUDDENLY, an abyss has opened up under Paul Martin's minority Liberal government. Only a few weeks ago, Mr Martin's supporters were looking forward with equanimity to the prospect of the prime minister calling an election some time next year to restore their party to the parliamentary majority it enjoyed for more than a decade until last year. Now, Canada is contemplating the possibility of the Conservative opposition forcing a June poll and going on to form a minority government. In due course, say some alarmed federalists, a new attempt by French-speaking Quebec to secede from Canada would follow. All this is the result of the explosive turn taken by the Gomery inquiry. This is looking into the abuse of a C$250m ($200m) scheme to promote federalism in Quebec set up by Jean Chrétien, Mr Martin's predecessor, in the wake of the narrow defeat of the last referendum on secession a decade ago.
Last week, Jean Brault, a Montreal advertising man, told the inquiry that his agency had received C$23.4m for services that included adding Liberal Party workers to his payroll. He also said he had contributed $1.2m to Liberal funds, much of it in cash in brown envelopes or against fake invoices. In other evidence, the inquiry heard claims that a graphic-design firm headed by Jacques Corriveau, a friend of Mr Chrétien and fundraiser for him, received sub-contracts worth $6.7m through the scheme. Judge John Gomery's decision to ban publication of Mr Brault's testimony (some of which is contested) was reversed in part after this was posted on an American website. The effect of the ban was merely to draw more attention to the testimony. The damage to the Liberals showed up in an opinion poll by Ipsos-Reid (see chart). Another poll, by EKOS, put the Conservatives even further ahead of the Liberals, at 36% to 25%. In Quebec, it showed Liberal support having collapsed to 18%, with the separatist Bloc Québécois at 48%.
These polls show the Conservatives level or even ahead in Ontario, a Liberal stronghold. That makes an early election attractive to Stephen Harper, the Conservative leader, as well as to the Bloc. If they combine their forces behind a no-confidence motion, they could outvote the Liberals in the House of Commons.
The Liberal ship is already showing signs of sinking. One of the 133 Liberal MPs this week left the party to sit as an independent. Another 33 Liberals defied Mr Martin and voted with the Conservatives to kill a government bill recognising same-sex marriage. Impatient Tories are urging Mr Harper to engineer a snap election. They argue that the best time for a vote would be late June, after a provincial election in British Columbia, a visit by Queen Elizabeth to western Canada-and the end of Judge Gomery's public hearings. If the polls are right, Mr Harper could expect to win such an election, though the Tories might win only one seat in Quebec.
It would be a close-run thing. Mr Martin, to whom no personal blame has attached over the scandal, remains slightly more trusted than Mr Harper. The polls suggest the leftish New Democrats and Greens would attract more disillusioned Liberals than would the Tories. Tellingly, some 85% of respondents told pollsters they want Mr Gomery to finish his work-his report is due in December-before an election. By then the Liberals may have recovered and Mr Harper's moment might have passed. If he does go for an early election, the big winner could be Gilles Duceppe, the Bloc's leader. Some would expect him to capitalise by leaving federal politics and taking charge of the more powerful Parti Québécois in the province itself. There he could challenge Quebec's clumsy Liberal premier, Jean Charest, and so pose a new threat to Canadian unity. All this is but speculation, but such is the febrile atmosphere in Canada's normally placid capital that it is being taken seriously.
If steroids is cheating, why isn't LASIK surgery?
How is Disney profitable?
Europe has its share of melancholy cities: the citizens of Lisbon take each destructive fire as fate's latest grim joke; Warsaw has been regularly ripped apart by foreign invaders; and it's hard to be cheerful in Trieste or, indeed, Cardiff. But the Istanbullu novelist Orhan Pamuk makes a persuasive, if repetitive, case for his city to be ranked as the most melancholy of all. [perhaps not the best city, then, to start a honeymoon?]
Saw this movie tonight. A little ponderous, heavy-handed, but still good.
posted by D @ 7:56 PM
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