THIRTY YEARS AGO, SYDNEY Pollack made Three Days of the Condor, a complicated thriller about a conspiracy inside the Central Intelligence Agency that unravels because of an unanticipated slip-up. An innocent CIA employee played by Robert Redford is out of the office–a Manhattan townhouse in which he and his colleagues do nothing but read books and newspapers in an effort to collect what is now called “open source intelligence”–getting coffee when everybody he works with is assassinated. The conspirators decide to pin the crime on Redford, who must work to stay ahead of the assassins and try to figure out what happened so that he can clear his name and save his life.
Three Days of the Condor is dated in many ways–from its CIA-is-the-root-of-all-evil plotline to its worshipful treatment of the New York Times to a misguided sex scene between Redford and Faye Dunaway that might have seemed “adult” in 1975 but now comes across as an act of rape. But it’s still one of the most gripping movies ever made, a masterpiece of tension and intrigue. Pollack does a brilliant job of unfolding the conspiracy so that it seems plausible–the crucial quality of any successful political thriller–and sets an unforgettable mood that mixes rueful melancholy with nerve-wracking anxiety.
Three Days of the Condor established Pollack as a major director. In the early 1980s, he made both Tootsie, one of the great American comedies, and the lovely Out of Africa, for which he won an Oscar. At the same time, Pollack began an unexpected second career as a character actor due to his hilarious, self-directed turn as a perplexed showbiz agent in Tootsie. He seems to have devoted much of his post-Oscar energy to performing, directing four movies over the past 20 years–only one of which, The Firm, was any good.
So it was exciting news last year when Pollack, whose last directorial effort six years ago was a lugubrious romance called Random Hearts, announced his next film would be a political thriller called The Interpreter, set in New York and starring two extraordinary actors, Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman. Perhaps this would be a return to form for a director who once seemed like he might be the successor to Alfred Hitchcock.
The Interpreter has just opened, and throughout, Pollack tries hard to recapture the spirit and feel of Three Days of the Condor. Kidman plays a United Nations interpreter who, like Redford in the earlier film, gets inadvertently mixed up in a conspiracy when she overhears a conversation in an African dialect that suggests there will be an assassination attempt during a U.N. General Assembly convocation. Penn takes the Faye Dunaway part as a grief-stricken Secret Service agent who gets assigned to the case.
Like the earlier movie, it makes vivid and exciting use of unusual New York City settings: a bus stop in central Brooklyn, a side street in the East Village, and, most especially, the interiors of the United Nations headquarters on First Avenue. Apparently aware that he and his institution could use some favorable publicity, Kofi Annan granted Pollack unprecedented access to U.N. facilities, and in the course of the film, Kidman and Penn wander all over the joint. They have a tense conversation inside the General Assembly hall. Kidman gazes down at the hall from an actual interpreter’s booth on the balcony. They have brisk conversations as they walk up and down the mammoth white hallways and staircases.
That’s all very interesting, and those who might be concerned that the movie is a U.N. whitewash can take comfort in the fact that there’s only one kumbaya moment. In the speech that surely won Pollack the privilege of filming at the United Nations, Kidman says she works there because her own bitter life experience has taught her that “words and compassion” are better than guns and killing. The fact is that Kidman is such a cold fish as an actress that she always seems more likely to spray people with bullets than shower them with love, and that undercuts the drippy sentiment.
Because the atmospherics are so good, The Interpreter has the makings of a wonderful thriller. The problem is that if you spend 30 seconds thinking about the elaborate plot at its heart, you realize that the movie makes absolutely no sense. The entire conspiracy depends on Nicole Kidman’s character leaving a flute behind in her interpreter’s booth so that she must return late at night to retrieve it. But how could the conspirators know she would leave a flute behind?
The implausibilities just keep stacking up. The Secret Service allows a senior aide to a genocidal African leader access to highly classified information, and even allows him to interrogate a key witness. On several occasions Kidman eludes the Secret Service, which is watching her 24 hours a day: once by sneaking out a fire escape, and once by driving a Vespa. We are asked to believe that her personal history–she was briefly a guerrilla in a West African nation and the lover of a guerrilla leader–would be unknown to the United Nations and the Central Intelligence Agency. We are also asked to believe that an African rebel leader in exile in New York, whose life is in danger, happily tells the New York Post that he just loves riding on public transportation in New York City and even names his favorite bus line.
Kidman and the conspirators are from a made-up African nation called Matobo that comes complete with a made-up tribal language called Ku. Both are handled quite well. But Pollack and his team also decided to invent a culture to go along with their made-up nation and language. And when Kidman starts up with the tribal wisdom of the Ku, the movie takes an extremely unfortunate turn. After awhile, Kidman begins to sound like Spock on Star Trek, offering Captain Kirk the wisdom of old Vulcan sayings. For example: When two people can’t agree, Kidman tells Penn, the Ku say they stand on opposite sides of the river. Penn nods sagely, as if to say, “Wow, heavy.”
Even more stunning is the Ku perspective on killing. Kidman explains that if the family members of a murder victim pursue vengeance, the Ku say they will spend the rest of their life in mourning. But if they forgive, they will find healing. The Interpreter offers a startling anthropological breakthrough. It proves that African tribal culture actually descends from a single source: a very enlightened yoga instructor somewhere in Marin County.
Sydney Pollack wants The Interpreter to be a tough-minded political thriller. But how can a movie be tough-minded when, at its core, it’s basically just a Chinese fortune cookie that takes two hours to eat?
John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
