The Interpreter (2005) Review

In the proud tradition of Grace Kelly, Kim Novak and Tippi Hedren, producer-director Sydney Pollack teams up with Nicole Kidman for one more shot at Hitchcock immortality.

In the classic Hitchcock mould © Universal Pictures

It is without a doubt one of the most fertile combinations in all of Hollywood history: Alfred Hitchcock and a beautiful blonde. As author Donald Spoto so brilliantly wrote about in his 1983 tome The Dark Side of Genius, the psychosexual attraction felt by the pudgy British filmmaker for his carefully chosen goddesses was greatly responsible for the pulsating charms of such classics as To Catch a Thief, Vertigo and Psycho.

With her frameless glasses, resplendent cheekbones, delicate Afrikaner accent and increasingly mysterious motives, Nicole Kidman is a leading lady who would have been very near and dear to Hitchcock's heart, accented in this case by some surface similarities between the plot of Sydney Pollack's high-gloss United Nations thriller and the master of suspense entries The Man Who Knew Too Much and North by Northwest. But despite the fact that Pollack likes to cameo in his films as much as Hitchcock once did, there is nowhere near the same amount of pent up repression behind the viewfinder. As a result, although it is most assuredly one of the handsomest dramas you're likely to see in a theatre all year, The Interpreter ultimately falls flat.

Pollack directing UN traffic © Universal Pictures

Like all good political assassination thrillers, The Interpreter begins with a crackle. A dusty old Jeep careens through the African desert, taking its three passengers past such heartbreaking civil war devastation tableaus as that of a son leading his newly blinded father along the side of the road. Once our trio of characters arrive at an abandoned soccer stadium, the plot kicks into high gear and then breathlessly transports us halfway around the world to the very counterpoint of diplomacy and civilization in the form of the United Nations.

So far, so good. Without quite knowing what we've gotten ourselves into, we are soon enveloped by a sense of foreboding as we get to know the characters of Silvia Broome (Kidman), a highly skilled UN translator, and Tobin Keller (Sean Penn), an apparently tormented Secret Service agent tasked with determining whether or not she has stumbled across a conspiracy of world-shaking importance.

Now it's a toss-up as to whether Hitchcock, if he were indeed around to work with Kidman today, would have ever had the courage to cast Sean Penn as his leading man. Hitch tended to prefer to live out his fantasies by way of as conventionally good looking a doppelganger as possible, people like Cary Grant and James Stewart. So maybe he would have preferred someone like George Clooney, Kidman's co-star in the 1997 action thriller The Peacemaker.

Comic relief co-star Keener © Universal Pictures

But through and through, Penn is the best thing in The Interpreter. A jumble of fatigue, anger and confusion - for reasons we can't divulge here - his character eventually becomes far more engaging than the cloak and dagger intrigue that swirls around Kidman's damsel in distress, something Hitchcock would never have allowed.

It also says something that the Hitchcock film that was shot partly on a fake United Nations studio soundstage, North by Northwest (Eva Marie Saint was the blonde in that one), remains ultimately more thrilling than the first Hollywood film ever allowed to run dolly tracks through these hallowed diplomatic grounds. Admittedly, the sight of the building's monumental central auditorium and use of its tangled network of corridors help create a heretofore unseen cinematic experience, but it all comes tumbling down at the end thanks to a pair of remarkably awkward scenes.

Every director other than Hitchcock, if they're lucky enough, has one perfect thriller in them. For Fred Zinnemann, it was 1973's The Day of the Jackal; for Jonathan Demme, it was The Silence of the Lambs; for Roman Polanski, it was Rosemary's Baby; for Brian De Palma, it was Blow Out. And, for Pollack, arguably, it was 1975's The Three Days of the Condor.

Secret Service agent Penn © Universal Pictures

So why was Pollack able to pull off the Hitchcock motif so much more successfully with Condor? You might say it's because Robert Redford was a better Hitchcock leading man than Penn; or, that the earlier plot kept Faye Dunaway much closer to the passive and imperiled territory that Hitch tended to generally favor for his damsels in distress.

But the truth is, Pollack was also thirty years younger. He had the kind of political bent and personal passions of a man half his current age, all of which helped power that earlier narrative to a concomitant boil. And that was the genius of Hitchcock; regardless of how successful he was in Hollywood or how beloved he became on television, he always had a healthy sense of psychosis.

Then again, in fairness to the 66-year-old Pollack - and the great MacGuffin concocted by his screenwriters Charles Randolph, Steve Zaillian and Scott Frank - even Hitchcock started losing steam at that age with the coda of Torn Curtain and Topaz, followed a few years later by Frenzy and Family Plot. Still, it's tantalizing to think how much more effective The Interpreter could have been as thrilling entertainment if its director were a little bit younger and a whole lot more off-kilter.