BEFORE: See, I could have followed the Demi Moore track to "Disclosure" and "Flawless", but that doesn't get me where I need to be in 5 days. Instead, Sean Penn carries over from "We're No Angels".
THE PLOT: Political intrigue and deception unfold inside the United Nations, where a U.S. Secret Service agent is assigned to investigate an interpreter who overhears an assassination plot.
AFTER: There's a great reason why more films don't lead off with "political intrigue" in their pitches - because usually that signifies... oh, sorry, I dozed off there for a second. Must have been from reading the term "political intrigue", because... damn, it happened again. So I mean this in the kindest way possible, here's a film that took political intrigue and at least made that somewhat interesting. A typical film about an African head of state coming to speak at the U.N. - boring! But toss in a possible assassination attempt, and we're getting somewhere.
Of course, to just have the thing happen with no warning, that would be wrong too - for starters, it would be happening, and there would be no chance to stop it. So the film uses a cheat - there's an interpreter who happens to overhear people planning it, and since she's an interpreter and just happens to be from that part of the world, she's able to understand an obscure (to most people, anyway) African dialect. In its own way, this is just as coincidental as Jimmy Stewart's character having a broken leg, a set of binoculars, and loads of free time when his neighbor commits a crime in "Rear Window". Or that Amish kid in "Witness" who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But what makes this complicated is the fact that she is from that part of the world, from the fictional country of Matobo, and is hardly impartial. Her past ends up calling her credibility into question, and even the agents assigned to protect her start to wonder if she's not just a witness to the plot, but part of it (see NITPICK POINT below). This is around the time things start to get confusing - now I expect a bit of confusion and a red herring here or there, but if you get to the end of the picture and you can tell me for sure who was behind the assassination attempt, well, then you're better at reading these things than I am. Was it real? Was it staged? Does it even matter?
(ASIDE: If you do make it to the end of the film - and I did fall asleep, so I had to finish it after work today - check out the original proposed ending, listed on IMDB.com under "trivia". Man, that would have made even less sense...)
The bigger problem that the film faces is making investigation-ing exciting. You know, the boring police work like knocking on doors, interviewing witnesses, sitting in a car during a stakeout. This is a problem that shows like "Law & Order" and "CSI" solve with shocking plot twists and rock music - and this film wasn't able to fall back on either of those. Instead we get a Secret Service agent who's damaged from recent tragedy (divorced AND widowed, for good measure) who finds a kindred spirit in our interpreter (after he stops suspecting her and eventually comes to trust her) who's nothing BUT damaged from tragedy. It's all emotional, but oh so depressing.
Look, I don't pretend to understand African politics, or dictators in general. I don't know that you even CAN make things better in any country by taking out one man, or if you just create a power vacuum which someone else will step in to fill. These things are complicated, and I just don't know if the U.N. is most effective in dealing with these things over time, or if you can even say one method of diplomacy is better than another. But according to this film, sometimes staging an assassination attempt allows a dictator to blame his enemies, which can make him more powerful. Right, and down is up and black is white. Which leads me to:
NITPICK POINT: If they really thought that the interpreter was part of the assassination plot, how would that even make sense? Why would she then bring what she said she heard to anyone's attention? If she wanted the head of an African nation dead, why wouldn't she just NOT report it? Just let it happen, and don't give security forces any time to prepare for it. Reporting it pretty much negates the possibility of her being involved, unless I'm missing something.
This was the last film directed by (the late) Sydney Pollack, and so far he's had a good showing this year - he also directed "Random Hearts" and "Sabrina", which I watched in February, and also "Jeremiah Johnson" and "This Property Is Condemned", which I watched last week. It's also the first film to shoot INSIDE the U.N. headquarters, instead of building a mock-up of the General Assembly on a soundstage or something.
Also starring Nicole Kidman (last seen in news footage in "The Queen"), Catherine Keener (last seen in "Your Friends & Neighbors"), Jesper Christensen (last seen in "Quantum of Solace"), Earl Cameron (also last seen in "The Queen"), George Harris (last seen in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2"), Yvan Attal, Hugo Speer, Maz Jobrani, David Zayas (last seen in "16 Blocks"), Robert Clohessy (ditto), Terry Serpico, Sydney Pollack (last seen in "Random Hearts"), Christopher Evan Welch (last seen in "Admission"), Michael Wright, Clyde Kusatsu (last seen in "Midway"), Adrian Martinez (last seen in "American Hustle").
RATING: 5 out of 10 metal detectors
No comments:
Post a Comment