from Eskimo 18
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Or were these
critics simply conferring artistic respectability on a
personality disorder, obsessive-compulsiveness?
Or, worse (by their
own lights), were they conferring respectability on
what is no more than a standard business practice of
branding one's wares?
One might also
question the legitimacy of judging the merits of a
particular work on the basis of criteria that can only
be imported from a consideration of the whole of that
artist's work. Our legal system recognizes the danger
of such guilt-by-association when it forbids
prosecutors to mention a defendant's previous arrests.
No matter.
Romanticism has a monopoly on our cultural operating
system and it stipulates that the true artist must be
tormented and driven. Any director who can move
blithely from one genre to another is obviously too
sane and reasonable to be anything more than a mere
craftsman, however fine a craftsman he may be, as in
Pollack's case. Yet there does seem to be something
missing in his work - a spark of urgency, or of madness
perhaps, or maybe it lacks a distinctive and compelling
voice.
His latest film,
“The Interpreter,” fits the pattern he has created
for himself over forty years of productivity. It's hard
to find anything bad to say about it. It's beautiful to
watch and suspenseful to feel, but it's hard to imagine
that it will set any hearts on fire. It may have been
precisely this absence of any tendency to incite his
viewers that gained him permission to film at the
United Nations, the first such permission ever granted,
and a major coup certainly. One of the elementary
attractions of cinema is that it lets us see pictures
of things we'll probably never see in person, whether
it's a murder in a deserted soccer stadium in Africa,
or an exploding bus in Brooklyn, or a lingering
close-up of Nicole Kidman. Actually, part of the U. N.
is open to the public, but this raises a different
cinematic phenomenon, which is that seeing something
with your own eyes is no match for seeing it through
the eyes of a talented cinematographer (in this case,
Darius Khondji).
“The
Interpreter” belongs to that sub-species of
thriller that presents us with the threat of a
political assassination. The best example of this is
probably “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962),
and while “The Interpreter” may not
challenge its pre-eminence, it is bound to find a
secure rank among the next most honorable specimens.
The movie shows its
class in many ways, a few of which I'll mention. After
a short opening scene in Africa that could serve as a
textbook lesson on how to construct suspense from
simple ingredients, the movie switches to the East Side
of Manhattan, where the United Nations building rises
up along the river, a tall, long, slender skyscraper
whose severely modernist lines radiate the Promethean
ambitions that inspired such architecture - and such an
institution. While the camera circles around above it,
shreds of conversation float up to us in a welter of
foreign languages, conversation that will be, for all
intents and purposes, meaningless to anyone without the
aid of the kind of translator portrayed here by Nicole
Kidman.
This shot
immediately reminded me - though I'm not sure it was
intentional - of the Tower of Babel. Superficially, the
allusion would seem to suit Pollack's purpose of
dramatizing the difficulty of getting along in a world
where linguistic mobility has not kept pace with the
spread of geographical mobility. But, on a deeper
level, the parallel would subvert his evident optimism
about the mission of the U. N.
The story is told in
the eleventh chapter of Genesis that, soon after the
creation, mankind “had one language and few
words.” They settled in the Tigris-Euphrates
plain and resolved, “Come, let us build ourselves
a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and
let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered
abroad upon the face of the earth.”
God saw what was
going on and he didn't like it, realizing that
“this is only the beginning of what they will do,
that nothing that they propose to do will now be
impossible for them.” So he
“confused” their languages and scattered
them abroad over the face of the earth, precipitating
the exact doom that the people had feared.
Was this the act of
a righteous God punishing the arrogance of man? Or was
it the retaliation of a peevish tyrant slapping down
his subjects for getting too uppity?
If we pursue this
parallel, the first interpretation would suggest that
the U. N. reflects another vain delusion that all
conflict can be eradicated by words (and a tall enough
tower); that the one-nation/one-vote basis of the U.N.
is only a mirage of democracy; that no fiat of
governments can reverse the ancient diaspora of
mankind.
The second
interpretation would suggest that the priests and
followers of the U. N. are victims rather than
perpetrators, but it spells their doom nonetheless.
TO MOVE onto less controversial
matters, one may remark that a parallel of a different
sort shows up in the casting of Jesper Christensen as
the menacing Nils Lud, Dutch security chief of the
African tyrant Zuwanie. It brings to mind Pollack's
excellent use of another Scandinavian actor in his
other (and perhaps better) thriller, “Three Days
of the Condor” (1975), an actor who was little
known at the time outside his native Sweden, where he
had been used frequently by Ingmar Bergman. Both
Christensen and Max von Sydow, with their bleak, craggy
faces and faded, aristocratic manners, embody the same
kind of wintry otherness. I imagine (and hope) we will
be seeing more of Christensen in English-language
movies in the future.
That Kidman turns in
another first-rate performance is hardly unexpected
news, but it's interesting to see how such a movie star
goes about creating a character who has beauty but not
the glamour that would be an anachronism in such a
character. A U. N. interpreter would need a big dose of
nerdiness, a high tolerance for study, to gain the
linguistic mastery required for such a job. Kidman
doesn't just rely on costume and make-up. I think one
of her tricks here is the way she walks as Silvia
Broome. Kidman creates a linear and slightly ungraceful
walk for Broome, with her toes turned out slightly,
like a duckling, and a certain up-and-down ungainly
bounce in her step. It's a subtle thing but it works on
you to convince you that this is a serious woman who
does not think overly much about her appearance.
Revelation through
reversal has been one of the key features of Western
drama ever since the theater of the Greeks, when
Aristotle analyzed the function of peripateia
(reversal) and anagnorisis (discovery) in tragedy. As
he pointed out, the most powerful dramas braid these
two together into a single strong rope: whether it's to
hang the hero (in a tragedy) or to rescue him (in a
comedy). Sometimes the reversal is just a matter of
external fortune: the high and mighty are brought low
and the underdogs are raised up, such a change being
brought on by a reversal in the action or plot
(mythos). But sometimes the change is internal as well,
when a character undergoes a change of heart (a matter
of ethos). Sometimes the reversal comes suddenly.
Odysseus drops his disguise of beggar and strings the
bow that no one else could bend, whereupon he
dispatches all his enemies.
But sometimes the
reversal is gradual. The relationship between
Kidman’s Silvia Broome, scared by the evidence
she has found of a plot to kill a visiting head of
state, Zuwanie, when he comes to address the U. N. in a
few days, and Sean Penn’s Tobin Keller, the
Secret Service agent assigned to protect Zuwanie and
investigate Broome, makes up the central pillar of this
drama. The gradual revelation - and reversal - of their
characters gives the movie a dramatic substance that
goes beyond the requirements of its (thriller) genre.
Broome starts out as the idealist, echoing the U.
N.’s peacemaker role in her private life,
lecturing the suspicious and bottled up Keller on the
transcendent virtues of forgiveness. By the end of the
movie, Broome has a gun to the head of a bad guy and
Keller is trying to talk her down from the heights of
her vengeful fury. The twisting together and apart of
these characters pulls us as well into an emotional
involvement with them and mitigates against any summary
judgment we might be tempted to make of them.
But the resolution
of the assassination plot is less convincing. The bad
guy is to be trundled off to the International Criminal
Court in The Hague, we’re told at the end, an
assertion of order meant to carry the same sense of
authority conveyed by the appearance of a god hoisted
over the old Greek theater stage by means of a crane,
the deus ex machina. But what will happen to the
long-suffering African country after it is relieved of
its present dictator? The movie goes out of its way to
show how liberators of such places tend to grow into
dictators. So what if one of them gets what he
deserves? There are many more waiting to take his
place. When will the country get what it deserves? Or
is this all it deserves? The movie dodges these
questions. If it made some acknowledgement of this
sorrowful state of affairs, of the paltriness of our
efforts to change the human heart (and local cultures),
then it could have earned a true and tragic dignity.
(And, in uttering such profanation, it could have been
denied entrance to the inner sanctum of the U. N.) As
it is, the film inadvertently brings us back to the
Tower of Babel at the end, with its ambitious plans for
a universal peace and harmony that some would say have
no place in human destiny.
