Review: The Interpreter

Director : Sydney Pollack
Main Cast : Sean Penn, Nicole Kidman

The Interpreter is a taut, emotional and gripping thriller about political intrigue and conspiracy starring two of the biggest acting heavyweights in the trade today in Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn. Even though the film opens with a cold-blooded murder carried out by - seemingly innocent at first - machine-gun wielding children, it’s not a sign of things to come. Instead, we get a clever drama that relies heavily on the storyline and the tension created throughout the film. Something like The Bourne Supremacy, but without the guns and explosives. Ironic then that the best scene in The Interpreter was the bomb-on-a-bus scene where 3 of the characters involved, together with their respective undercover Secret Service “tails”, unknowingly converge on a bus that later explodes.



Like so many post-9/11 films, The Interpreter is a film with a message, that diplomacy and the UN is the best and only way to solve major conflicts, rather than casting it aside and do things unilaterally, and we are constantly reminded (a bit too much, I think) about this by Nicole Kidman’s character. Indeed, besides the two leads, the star of the show is very much the United Nations itself, finally making its debut on the silver screen. It’s been reported that even Alfred Hitchcock himself didn’t get permission to film there in the past.