May 5th, 2005

  As a detour from the beaten paths of stupidity and boredom that have come to symbolize contemporary filmmaking in general, a new thriller with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, directed by the crafty and polished Sydney Pollack, automatically gets the adrenaline going. So what a disappointment when The Interpreter turns out to be so muddled, dreary, and preposterous. For a movie that aims to cash in on today’s hysterical fear of terrorism, even the terrorists are confused.
  It’s great to get an inside tour of the United Nations, where a lot of this movie was filmed, but for an international territory surrounded by the tightest security on the planet, this is a U.N. where simply everybody comes and goes at all hours carrying state-of-the-arts weapons without a single alarm. After the entire U.N. is evacuated following a terrorist alert, a pretty, young interpreter (Nicole Kidman) returns to the dark and empty control booth overlooking the General Assembly to get her back pack and her flute, and not a single metal detector rings a bell. (I’m sorry, but even if you work there, you can’t come and go, roaming the dark corridors anytime you please, without passing through security checkpoints.)
  Worse still, the interpreter overhears a secret plot to assassinate a South African dictator over an open mike, and as irony would have it, she’s the only one at the U.N. who can understand the language of the intended victim because he is from the same region in South Africa where her family was murdered. By the same villain, natch. Wait a sec. An open mike at the U.N.? The entire security staff all out of the building for a smoke following a terrorist threat? This all happens in the first 15 minutes. The credibility factor goes downhill from there. While you’re scratching your head in a suspension of logic, you at least get to watch the lovely Nicole stalked, chased, threatened in the shower, and on the verge of many perilous predicaments while speaking myriad languages. She does all of this, by the way, while trying to bring down an African demagogue guilty of mass genocide, who is on his way to New York to address the U.N. General Assembly and clear his name by promising democratic reforms and free elections.
  Sean Penn and his sidekick, Catherine Keener, are the Secret Service team assigned to protect visiting dignitaries (thus explaining why the traffic is always clogged within a 10-block radius of the East River when the U.N. is in session). Now they find they have to keep an eye on the attractive, blonde interpreter, too. With at least three different groups of terrorists vowing to knock her off, this is a girl who spells trouble in 20 different languages. Under investigation herself (she used to be a gun–toting South African rebel whose hatred of the visiting dictator is well documented) and used by the Secret Service as bait to lure the terrorists out in the open, she’s in double jeopardy, and there’s a knife or a machine gun during every New York minute, including a take on the shower scene from Psycho. The movie maintains a certain tension as long as it’s about a pretty girl in trouble in broad daylight. But when all of the terrorists arrive at cross purposes, killing each other for different causes, incoherence reigns.
  Then there’s the army of tangential characters—a French photographer with the names of all of the people massacred in South Africa, a doctor who works in an AIDS hospice, Ms. Kidman’s murdered brother—and an intense showdown between all of the conspirators trying to assassinate each other on a crowded bus in Brooklyn. By the time Mr. Penn ends up pointing a gun at Ms. Kidman while she points another gun at the head of the African dictator—again in a top-security room at the U.N. with no metal detectors—you will have no choice but to surrender all claims to reason and wonder who does Nicole Kidman’s hair.
  Under such daunting circumstances, The Interpreter is slick. The script, by Charles Randolph, Scott Frank, and Seven Zaillian, contains some arresting talk about global corruption, the death of diplomacy, and the hopelessness of political idealism. And the two stars knock themselves sideways to breathe life into cardboard clichés. Working with a South African accent that sometimes gets in her way, Ms. Kidman is cool, courageous, and all about the power of words. Mr. Penn is such a resourceful actor that even though he’s playing a stock role, he invests it with emotional minutiae that forms fascinating conflicts. He’s all about rules and fists, but the loss of his wife in a car accident with another man has driven him to fear, loneliness, and a state of cynicism that is the opposite of the girl’s optimism. His disillusionment and her hope for world peace make interesting counterparts. Unfortunately, the film makes nothing of their budding mutual attachment and leaves them stranger than when they met.
  At the press screening I attended, the critics were standing around in groups trying to figure out what they had just seen. None of it, we were forced to concede, made much sense. What The Interpreter needs is an interpreter.

  The Amityville Horror marks a cheesy return visit to Long Island’s most famous haunted house. If you were unlucky enough to suffer through the lousy 1979 version with Margot Kidder and the pre-Barbra James Brolin, you know the story...about a creepy old house at 112 Ocean Avenue where a 23-year-old wacko claimed voices from his TV test pattern told him to climb the stairs and butcher his entire family in their beds with a shotgun.
  One year later, a nice couple named George and Kathy Lutz moved into the house with their dog and three kids after buying it for a bargain-basement price. About that basement: Even the realtor refused to descend those stairs. “Houses don’t kill people,” said Mr. Lutz bravely, “people kill people.” In the 28 days before they fled the house paralyzed with fright, their daughter bonded with an imaginary playmate who drove her to dangle from the roof, blood poured through the water faucets, Mr. Lutz chopped the dog to tartare, the priest who arrived to bless and sanctify the house with holy water was attacked by killer insects, and every Lutz met the face of Satan in the gateway to hell.
  It makes a good yarn, even if it seems more predictable than frightening. Trouble is, times have changed. Yes, a violent tragedy in 1974 did put Amityville on the map, with tourists (with digital cameras who still do drive-bys) looking for photo-ops. But the facts about the Lutz family have been hugely contested and disproved since the 1970s and the prime market value of the remodeled Dutch Colonial with the inviting dormers at 112 Ocean Avenue is considered anything but low-end real estate. Sigh. Today, even the ghouls have inflated price tags.
  Hollywood must be desperate. They’re recycling schlock from the bottom halves of old double features, even crummy TV shows. What’s next, The Fog and House of Wax? Actually, they’re both on the way.
  But for now, let’s get Amityville out of the way. In the remake, hunky, camera-ready Ryan Reynolds proves he’s got acting chops as well as six-pack abs. His George Lutz has humor as well as strangeness, and his fetish for chopping wood using a hatchet with a mind of its own gets the audience going every time. Melissa George’s Kathy Lutz is distracting eye candy. After Mr. Reynolds floats nude in a blood-soaked bathtub, she’s the only one who actually suggests they move out. A few lines get laughs, but the horror is standard fare, without a shred of innovation. Mr. Reynolds is too much like a refugee from a Men’s Health cover to be believable as an ordinary daddy with mortgage payments and muffler repairs, and by the time he gets around to chasing the children through the house with an ax, dazed, and simpering moronically and hypnotized by ghosts, you wonder how many times everyone has rented Jack Nicholson in The Shining. This may not be a good movie, but it’s a pretty persuasive ad for homeowner’s insurance.
 

 For those who don’t give a hang about acting and wouldn’t know an artistic achievement if it fell on their heads and produced a concussion, there’s always another Ashton Kutcher movie. To call A Lot Like Love the best Ashton Kutcher movie ever made might sound like calling one of Sweeney Todd’s meat pies more edible than the rest. But compared with others (like the misguided Butterfly Effect and the brain-dead Guess Who), I think it’s safe to say that although his movies come in two categories (dumb and dumber) this one could have been worse. After imitating Ben Stiller, the TV prankster turned wannabe film star now channels John Cusack in A Lot Like Love. This is not a big ambition, but for a throwaway date flick, it has moments.
  Two average, familiar, and absurdly cute twentysomethings meet on a plane from L.A. to New York. He (Mr. Kutcher) is a clumsy nerd. She (Amanda Peet) is a foxy slut who initiates him into the mile-high club. After they land, he wants to move it up a notch. She writes it off as a meaningless sex encounter. For no reason, they make a pact to reunite in six years. Thus begins an on-again/off-again relationship that picks up between breakups with others. She struggles with an acting career. He sells diapers on the Internet. The film drags on like this, brazen only in its blandness, until it reaches a denouement as predictable as it is preposterous.
  For two actors with a penchant for choosing lousy scripts, the leads depend on nothing more than their looks to keep the audience awake. If you don’t find both Amanda Peet’s nervous twitch and Ashton Kutcher’s puppy-dog innocence as phony as an Enron stock certificate, you might find some charm in A Lot Like Love. Too bad director Nigel Cole’s idea of comic timing is to encourage them to open their lips wide enough to spit their meals into each other’s mouths. The movie is spectacularly forgettable, but if Mr. Kutcher really insists on making movies, this one is more tolerable than the junk that came before it.

  The word “legend” is randomly kicked around so much that it seems to apply to just about everyone who has lived long enough to win an Oscar, sell a million records, or survive at least one war. With so many phony legends jockeying for applause, it’s hard to recognize the real deal when we see one. So sound the trumpets for Ladies in Lavender. In this radiant, heartwarming movie (a rarity in itself these days), two legendary stars share the screen, and attention must be paid. If Judi Dench and Maggie Smith—two royal dames there is absolutely, positively, nobody anywhere like—have not earned the status reserved for genuine legends of the British Empire, then the Prince of Wales is a King Charles spaniel.
  Ladies in Lavender, carefully written and superbly directed by the actor Charles Dance, is a film of unusual elegance and artistry, set in the early years of World War II, about two elderly sisters whose comfortable but dull lives on the coast of Cornwall are interrupted by a shipwreck that sweeps overboard one sole survivor—a mysterious young man who washes up on the beach below their cottage. Awkwardly nursing their guest back to health with the aid of their fat, crusty housekeeper (Miriam Margolyes), the intrusion of life from the outside world in the form of a handsome, smiling stranger with a broken ankle who speaks only Polish and German, opens old wounds, revives old resentments, and kindles rivalries long resigned to mothballs.
  For Janet (Dame Maggie Smith), the logical, pragmatic one who was briefly married as a young woman to a man who died in World War I, the boy symbolizes the son she never had. But the spinsterish and childlike Ursula (Dame Judi Dench) develops an affection for the lad that is far from maternal. Doting over his every need, placing a flower on his breakfast tray, teaching him English, she makes him the surrogate of everything she never had—brother, lover, and the Prince Charming she has waited for all of her life to rescue her from her prison tower. As their castaway is slowly welcomed by the local farmers and fishermen who are suspicious of anyone from outside the village, the sisters overcome the language barriers and learn that their visitor is a Polish Jew named Andreas (played with wonderful honesty and naturalism by the appealing German actor Daniel Brühl, who captivated audiences last year in Goodbye Lenin). Andreas was escaping the Nazi anti-semitism of Krakow on a ship bound for New York when he was washed into the sea.
  More thrilling still, he is an accomplished violinist. Janet and Ursula now have a fresh drive in their efforts to make Andreas a permanent part of their little family; they will encourage his talent and fuel him with the ambition to make a career. But their dreams are short-circuited by a vacationing artist (Natascha McElhone) whose brother is a famous musician with important connections on the concert stage. Before the summer ends, Andreas is abruptly whisked away to London with no time to say goodbye, leaving the old women desperate with worry. The loss is unsettling for Janet, but devastating to Ursula, and as the season turns to autumn and the coastal chill settles in on the Cornish coast, the events that wedged the two women apart also bring them closer together when the days shorten and the nights grow long.
  Then, in a finale that will quicken your pulse and touch your heartstrings with a miraculous lack of sentimental manipulation, Andreas makes his debut on the BBC. For once, the war news of storm clouds over Europe is replaced by the beauty of music. Janet and Ursula invite the whole village to their house to listen on the BBC. But in a momentary decision of rare impulsiveness, they travel to London to burst with pride in person at the concert hall. For a moment, Andreas is reunited with the little family that saved his life, but the tears of gratitude and joy quickly fade as he is swept away by Sir Thomas Beecham. Ursula and Janet walk away, less lonely than before, having learned at last the importance of letting go, and disappear in the throng of Andreas’s admirers, to begin the next chapter in a continuing story that has found new value.
  Lush, sun-dappled photography by the distinguished cinematographer Peter Biziou, the honesty of village life, the human elements that embellish maps of experience in the faces of the actors, a multitude of authentic period details, and gorgeous music by Nigel Hell and the Royal Philharmonic with violin solos by internationally acclaimed Joshua Bell add up to an idyllic, impeccable, enriching, and amazing cinematic experience. Above all, there is the rapture of watching the energy and concentration of two of the world’s most accomplished actors. The passion in their glances, exchanges, and closeness—like two bookends on a library shelf—is exhilarating. Watching them thrust and parry and feed each other with the crumpets of the English language the way it should be spoken has an effect I can only call enriching. To find this many exemplary elements in one movie in 2005 is a miracle.
  In a time of micro-minute trends, I’m not naïve enough to suggest that a movie graced by Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith might pave the way for a future where timeless legends take precedence over fly-by freaks, but it sure is transforming to have them around for a visit, no matter how brief.