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'The Interpreter': Translates secrets into moderate success

Throughout "The Interpreter," director Sydney Pollack presents us with blurry images that require a few moments to focus on what's important in the frame. It's an easy way of saying that information is being withheld from us, a point made repeatedly by the film's dialogue.

Universal Studios 'The Interpreter' 3 out of 5 stars Director: Sydney Pollack Starring: Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn, George Harris, Catherine Keener Run time: 128 minutes Release date: April 22, 2005 Rating: PG-13 for violence, some sexual content and brief strong language. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate "The Interpreter"   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

But by the time they're revealed, many of the film's secrets feel like MacGuffins — those mysteries of plot that turn out to be inconsequential in films such as Alfred Hitchcock's "North By Northwest" (which, like this one, brings violence into the United Nations' halls). The movie wants to grapple with Big Topics, and its plot is built around them, but their real-life weight never clings to the drama in a way that would raise "The Interpreter" above the ranks of other generically entertaining thrillers.

Nicole Kidman plays a woman who fled the fictional African nation of Matobo after the country's popular new ruler began slaughtering his opponents. As she tells us often, she went to work as a U.N. interpreter because of her fervent belief in the institution's power to fix the world's problems, but when she overhears someone plotting to kill Matobo's leader, her faith in diplomacy is tested.

Sean Penn is the Secret Service agent assigned to the case, and he turns out to be a good deal less tolerant of Kidman's secrets than the filmmakers are. The life of a foreign dignitary might be in danger, but Penn spends a lot of time worrying about the woman bringing the threat to light. Penn begins with a professional distance, but when he is forced to spend more time guarding Kidman's life, surveillance (shades of another Hitchcock film, "Rear Window") turns to a predictable infatuation. The pair are damaged soulmates, and the threat of a high-profile assassination looks less and less important compared with Kidman's relationship with the past.

Pollack indulges in some tacky devices to help us identify with his emotionally distant heroine. Little snippets of unnecessary voiceover pop up here and there, but things get ugly near the end, when the sights and sounds of the past literally materialize in front of Kidman as she grapples with tragic news. Later, the film goes overboard milking a relationship between the stars that never quite clicks.

On its way toward a resolution, though, the movie delivers some good moments of suspense: One particularly nail-biting sequence has multiple manhunts converging on a city bus, an unforseen meeting that has the audience as unsettled as the cops.

The film's ending dredges up the victims' names in Matobo's ethnic cleansing and reads them aloud. It's clear that the filmmakers would love for their story to call to mind the real atrocities taking place around the world — to keep the issue alive in the mainstream now that "Hotel Rwanda" has slipped out of theaters and onto video-store shelves. But while "The Interpreter" is a fine policier, it doesn't have the gravitas to deal with genocide. Those names feel like a well-intentioned afterthought, the fictional counterparts of Africans who should be uppermost in the minds of the real United Nations, not one invented to house a near-romance between Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn.