Sydney Pollack
The Interpreter

"The Interpreter", perhaps the last true feature film by Sydney Pollack, demonstrates an incontrovertible reality: those who truly know how to make cinema always manage to do so, regardless of a rather clichéd and already-seen story. This is the case for many figures now deemed "old" by the new millennium's production establishment. Figures who, for better or worse, consistently produce noteworthy works. From Clint Eastwood to Martin Scorsese, passing through Ferrara and Pollack himself.

Why dwell on this film, although Pollack has done better? First and foremost for a very simple reason: in recent years, a myriad of pseudo-political thrillers have been produced, some more and some less, lacking in particular insights. Pollack, on the other hand, draws from a rather banal story, a thriller with political and dramatic twists that bears the indelible marks of the mastery (but above all, the experience) of the filmmaker who brought it to life.

The focal point of the story lies in the politicization of every aspect, in the irrational exacerbation of everything even remotely linked to power. Secret services and "men" hired by unspecified entities, used to discover every minute detail of Silvia Broome's (Nicole Kidman) life, an interpreter who, against her will, becomes embroiled in a diplomatic case with ethnic and bloody repercussions. Others try to keep everything under wraps, because the weight of the news in this increasingly computerized and hyper-controlled world is so high that it can determine a person's destiny.

Different elements and genres that Sydney Pollack (already a filmmaker of "Jeremiah Johnson", "Three Days of the Condor" and "Absence of Malice"), manages to blend together thanks to his cinematic wisdom, honed after years and years of work. The American never succumbs to sentimentality, nor to violence for its own sake. His "The Interpreter" is a film that ties into the key themes of the "new politics", without disdaining the denunciation of the complex conditions of the inhabitants of Matobo (a state created by Pollack for the film, but it is believed that the characteristics described are the same as Zimbabwe, which in the past caused the United States not a few problems).

A simple film in its complexity, that manages to engage thanks also to the good (but not excellent) performances of Sean Penn and Kidman, here before being ruined by various operations and botox. The real strength, however, without a shadow of a doubt, is Sydney Pollack himself, still capable of directing scenes like the spectacular "three-person" chase on the bus.

"The firing around us prevents us from hearing, but the human voice is different from other sounds and can be heard above the noises that bury it, even when it's not shouting, even if it's just a whisper. The slightest whisper can be heard above armies when it tells the truth."