Script Stinks I was excited about the new Sydney Pollack suspense thriller, "The Interpreter." I mean, "Three Days of the Condor," is a true movie classic in the thriller genre. And how can one go wrong with two A-list movie actors (Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman). Maybe we as the movie public just want to be entertained by our favorite actors. As PT Barnum once said, you can't predict the taste of the public or maybe it was, "There is a sucker born every minute." Well, I felt like a sucker after purchasing my movie ticket. This movie has so many flaws I don't even know where to begin.
First of all, let's talk about the chemistry between Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman. There is a concept in movie watching called cognitive dissonance. Basically, the movie goer is ignoring certain things in a movie that aren't exactly real but it's okay because the movie is so entertaining we suspend the trivial facts and let our imagination run wild with the flow of the story. Well, after a while, I did not buy it for a moment that these two actors were attracted to each other. They were so opposite that I just could not buy it. Sean Penn is mumbling through most of the movie. Is he trying to play a secret service agent that went to the same actor's studio as James Dean? I don't know but Sean Penn is starting to play Sean Penn in many of his roles. I felt like he was just collecting a paycheck and he did not want to be in this film. He is also grieving at the loss of a loved one that happened two weeks prior to meeting up with Nicole Kidman's character. Fellow secret service agents are not even treating Sean Penn any different from a guy who just lost his pet dog. Nicole Kidman's character is playing a character that seems indifferent to any human contact. She also is on a higher intellectual plane than Penn so I did not see any chemistry between them. If there was any, it was so subliminal, it quickly flashed across the screen before I had a chance to see it.
Second, the script is crap. It was so complicated I started tuning out right after the bus explosion. You had one African tribal leader doing this and you had another African leader living in Brooklyn doing that. After a while, I had to ask myself, what is going on here? I'm lost and you know what? Once I get lost, you've lost me. I would have walked out but the theater was so crowded I would have had to climb over 10 people. Why didn't this script work for me? It's fairly easy to decipher. The original screenwriter who came up with the whole idea of the Interpreter did not work on the final draft of the script. Charles Randolph wrote the original screenplay. He is very talented. He was busy with another project so Pollack brought in two other scribes that are experts in reconstructing scripts. The original script had Kidman's character lying about the whole whispering secret situation at the UN and she was more involved with the plot assassination. My god! Hello!!! That would have made this script more suspenseful. This is the problem with bringing in too many other voices to write a script. The plot line got very confusing midway through and I started tuning out. Goodbye, I'm gone. Another thing is that Pollack likes to tinker with the script as he is filming. He even said in an interview that he drives people crazy because he makes last minute changes to the script. Duh? Well, I wasn't surprised to see that this movie is making money. The public's taste never ceases to amaze me. This film was disappointing and a piece of crap. It's just another example of how Hollywood doesn't like to take chances on innovative scripts and usually regurgitates old plot formulas to make a quick buck. If you want to see a good thriller, rent the movie, "North by Northwest" by Alfred Hitchcock. Randolph's original script was trying to capture Hitchcock's style. The studio chiefs didn't get his original vision so they called in the other writers to completely mess up his story. I think it's time Sydney Pollack thinks about hanging it up. He's getting stale.