There's a point in The Interpreter when Sylvia Broome (Nicole Kidman) explains to the haggard Secret Service Agent Tobin Keller (Sean Penn) a tradition from Matobo, an apocryphal African nation the writers dreamed up from a fistful of Scrabble letters.
When someone has committed murder, she quietly recounts, the perpetrator is taken by the community to a nearby lake. They hold a party and at dawn throw the bound and guilty man into the water. It is up to the victim's family whether or not the murderer will be saved from drowning. If they let him die, it means the family will be in mourning for the rest of their days.
This scene best captures my impressions of The Interpreter. I liked the script's willingness to introduce ridiculous conceits in order to establish a recurring motif about forgiveness. I liked the way Nicole Kidman's accent gently alternates between South African and American mid-Atlantic when she described the ritual. But most of all, I liked how the film had me sold on its preposterous story.
It didn't matter what was being said, I was already convinced by how they said it. For a few hours on Saturday, I knew that somewhere out in the African steppe, a man was getting his thumbs up-thumbs down about being chucked into a lake.
Being hoodwinked like this is why I like the movies. Each of us can appreciate films in much the same way we value people in our daily life. Just like people, no film is ever perfect. But if we happen to like the movie we just saw, its blemishes can't be that important.
Yet, as I watched The Interpreter and its story of conspiracy and assassination in the U.N. and Africa, I couldn't help but be amused by its little flaws. They're charming in the way only imperfections can be. I liked how Penn's Keller instinctively distrusts Kidman's character only because the plot would be very boring if he didn't. I enjoyed how Keller's partner, played by Catherine Keener, never contributes to the story, but is essential to enjoying the movie because of her wonderfully droll sarcasm.
The process of filmmaking is unavoidably interpretive. Directors read scripts and try to understand, without taking prescription cold medicine, what the writers were thinking when they put their thoughts on paper. Then they take the writers' ideas, come up with some of their own, borrow a few from better filmmakers, practice a bit of wizardry called "movie magic" and package it together for our appraisal.
Director Sydney Pollack took a piece of literary Swiss cheese five writers called a screenplay and found a taut, engaging drama in the wary and tired humanity of its characters. Kidman, despite a lack of resolution over her accent, and Penn both bring the requisite sincerity and understatement to their roles.
The Interpreter isn't so much a movie about deciphering the layers of the plot. It is about understanding the barriers people put up to wall their personal loneliness.
In the end, maybe this film actually was about collusion and foreign policy and not the acute drama I found it to be. But if The Interpreter is a political thriller, I wasn't really thrilled. Though it may have started out that way, somewhere in the filming it must have been lost in the translation.
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