The Interpreter, directed by Sydney Pollack, focuses on an alleged attempt to assassinate Dr. Edmund Zuwanie (played by Earl Cameron), for twenty-eight years the president of Matobo, a fictional South African country. During most of the movie, he is en route to New York, where he is scheduled to deliver a speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations to defend his record against charges of genocide. The assassination allegation is articulated by Silvia Broome (played by Nicole Kidman), who is an English-language interpreter at the UN. She bases her charge on a statement that she heard one night in her interpreter sound booth, where she went to retrieve some items left in haste when the UN was evacuated due to a terrorist bomb threat. When the allegation surfaces, the U.S. Secret Service is summoned to provide protection to Zuwanie, but their only lead is Broome's statement. Accordingly, agent Tobin Keller (played by Sean Penn) interviews Broome, who says that she fears for her life because she accidentally turned on lights in the booth while the statement was made, thus calling attention to herself as an earwitness. Keller then arranges protection for Broome, in part because he cannot rule out the possibility that she may be part of the plot. The twists and turns of the story involve a bus that is bombed with an opposition leader inside, mysterious characters tailing Broome, revelations about the deaths of members of Broome's family due to actions taken by Zuwanie, and Keller's unexpected admission to Broome that his wife recently died in an automobile accident. However, the story stops short of having Broome and Keller nude in the same bed. The Hitchcockian suspense mystery provides some clues along the way for perspicacious filmviewers to anticipate the final showdown between Zuwanie and his assailant as well as hints about the corny epilog, in which Keller allows the person at the center of the plot to get away scot-free. Along the way, Broome reveals a fascinating conundrum, presumably drawn from African culture: If someone kills a member of your family and is captured, local justice requires him to be tied up and thrown into the river by the aggrieved family; if they let him drown, the family will have vengeance but will never stop grieving, whereas saving the murderer from death will release the family from lament. Despite the intrigue, The Interpreter depicts the United Nations as a praiseworthy institution. Broome claims that she entered the UN's employ seven years earlier because she decided to abandon a youthful role as a machineguntoting opponent of Zuwanie, now preferring peaceful ways of solving political conflicts. The UN's security system is portrayed as efficient and seamlessly cooperates with American government officials. Zuwanie's proposed speech exemplifies how public diplomacy is a useful way to enable world public opinion to hear all sides of a debate rather than allowing protesters to try him through the media, as it were in absentia. Finally, the Security Council does its job of voting to remand Zuwanie to the custody of the International Criminal Court in The Hague for trial on charges of committing genocide. However, evidence of genocide is notably lacking in the film. Instead, filmviewers hear Broome read the names of those executed by Zuwanie's regime, both white and black, thus hinting that Zuwanie is a stand-in for the infamous Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Nevertheless, the reading of the names appears to imply that there are more dead in Matobo than those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, thus suggesting that Americans are too self-centered in trying to root out Al Queda's terrorist plotters while doing almost nothing as hundreds of thousands of deaths pile up in such places as Darfur. Director Pollack doubtless did not anticipate that when The Interpreter was about to be released, President George W. Bush would nominate for UN delegate its most bitter critic, thereby sending a signal that he considers the UN to be a useless body, whose delegates in turn fail to be impressed as he continues to make up facts to support his various causes. MH
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