The Problem With Colonialism-Nicole Kidman And Sean Penn’s “The Interpreter” (2005)-A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

The Interpreter, starring Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn, directed by Sidney Pollack, 2005

Everybody with the slightest familiarity with Africa under colonial rule, European colonial rule, knows that those powers carved up the continent to their liking, their pleasure and just as in the Middle East after World War I did not consider ethnic, tribal or any other rational arrangement when their had their wanting habits on. And basically as each colonial territory gained its freedom by hook or by crook those arbitrary lines of division were left in place. Left in place for whatever the liberation fighters could put together stable or not. That is the background for the film under review, The Interpreter, with the odd proviso that the film looked at how that carving up affected the whites, or a couple of the whites, who fought in the struggle for liberation. Or thought that was what they were doing.           

How do you get to the interpreter part, the title of the picture part? Easy. That is where Silvia, played by Nicole Kidman, a white ex-liberation fighter in a fictitious African country who eventually ahd a change of heart and laid down her weapon, comes in (she and her brother had joined the resistance, the “new” post-colonial resistance, after the President of the country had mined the rural areas and their parents and sister were blown away from one such land mine). Silvia was now an interpreter at the United Nations. Unfortunately one night in the building after an evacuation she overheard a conversation in Ku, a dialect she knew from her country so there was no mistaking that what the conversation was about was a plot to kill the President of her country of origin. The guy whose landmines had killed her family.           

This where colonialism effects and where yesterday’s freedom fighters get wrapped in tyranny and corruption. That President once the hope of the nation upon liberation has turned into another garden-variety dictator who has moreover been accused of ethnic cleansing atrocities as part of his keeping power. The International Criminal Court (which by the way in the real world the United States does not recognize, did not sign the accords establishing that body and don’t expect it to do so anytime soon) wanted to put him on trial. He was going to the United Nations to speak before the General Assembly to lay out his case, to conjure up some excuse to get off the hook.      

That is where things get tricky, where what Silvia had overheard and reported to her superiors, gets involved in international diplomacy (and intrigue). The U.S. Secret Service which has a unit charged with protecting foreign dignitaries is put on the spot. Or rather crack agent Tobin, played by Sean Penn is put on the spot.  He didn’t believe what Silvia overheard, or maybe better as he delves into her background what her agenda was in the whole matter. They go back and forth and Tobin eventually saw that what she overheard was the real thing, or what they thought was the real deal. As it turned out this nasty President and his henchmen had killed off the opposition (including Silvia’s brother who stayed in the armed struggle against the President) and had cooked up the whole assassination scheme to cover their tracks, to gain sympathy against those ICC indictments. Silvia, beside herself once she had found out that her brother had been murdered along with her lover by the President’s henchmen, was able to get into the “safe room” where the President after the bogus assassination attempt was being held in order to get her revenge. Tobin talked her out of that rash action. The President would thereafter goes before the ICC and Silvia was expelled from the United States. 

In the end no romance between the magnetic pair of Kidman and Penn but a better than average thriller centered on the problems, the serious problems, with neo-colonial Africa.