Tower of Babel

THE INTERPRETER

Directed by Sidney Pollack

If a veteran director made a terrific movie, would critics and viewers notice?

That's the depressing question posed by Sidney Pollack's The Interpreter, a paranoid thriller about a white African translator (Nicole Kidman) drawn into a U.N. assassination plot, and the depressive FBI agent (Sean Penn) assigned to protect her. It's an ambitious commercial picture (an oxymoron?) that simultaneously evokes the paranoid desperation of Three Days of the Condor and the grief-fogged longing of Random Hearts. Its subtlety will be lost on hipsters who think the only real directors are ones who italicize every personal or artistic touch to make sure no one misses their cleverness; its adult characters and muted tone will alienate opening-weekend escapists who start fidgeting after five minutes without a brawl or an explosion. See it on a big screen while you can.

Pollack and director of photography Darius Khondji conceive the tale via simple but powerful compositions, symmetrical in appearance but asymmetrical in meaning. Extreme wide shots (lateral and God's-eye) achieve formal balance via implied center lines that cut the CinemaScope frame into perfect halves and transform U.N. and Manhattan architecture into Rorshach blots whose symmetry is gummed up by roving, ant-sized humans. Pollack's regular editor, William Steinkamp, crosscuts between events occurring in different locations so deftly that you may not realize until later that the events were rhymed not just by plot function, but by gesture, emotion and theme. In some close-up conversations, the movie frames shots and reverse-shots so characters experiencing similar emotions appear to be divided by a mirror or joined like puzzle pieces. (This movie's visual intelligence equals Wong Kar-Wai's The Hand. Yeah, I said it.)

The movie's script-credited to Charles Randoph, Scott Frank and Steven Zaillian-strengthens Pollack and Khondji's visual tropes (symmetry, division, reflection, connection) via dialogue and backstory. Kidman's interpreter, Sylvia Broome; Penn's lawman, Tobin Keller, and other major characters are all biographically bisected by traumatic events I refuse to spoil here. Suffice it to say that Pollack's people are haunted by past lives, wrong choices, private regrets. (Even the film's erstwhile villain, a fictional African dictator who evolved from rebel leader to murderous strongman, cannot fathom how he got from there to here; riding down 2nd Avenue in a limo, he glares at protestors while reminiscing about his last visit to New York some 40 years earlier, when he was lauded as an heroic revolutionary.)

Pollack's sureness turns Kidman's Achilles' heel-her porcelain opacity-into a source of strength. She conceals things from Tobin and the audience, yet we never feel cheated or misled; she keeps us guessing while taking full responsibility for every brazen or deceptive move her character makes. Penn matches Kidman's bottled-up intensity; no American star is more credible playing angry, damaged but decent working-class men. Their feelings well up and spill out, but not in a conventional, predictable way (this is not a lovers-on-the-run picture). A raw, confessional-hell, melodramatic-exchange between Sylvia and Tobin in a park is the movie's bravest, most moving scene. Pollack confirms its emotional significance by breaking from the film's outwardly "realistic" tone and piercing Sylvia's consciousness with visions that emerge from the city like ghosts.

The Interpreter systematically exposes Tobin and Sylvia's pretense of neutrality as a calculated pose-an attempt to guard against further pain. Both characters secretly long to have opinions, to be involved, to act. Their predicaments suggest a (coded) political point of view toward the movie's principal location, where nations convene in the name of global good while secretly pursuing personal business, and communicate in an agreed-upon common tongue without ever relinquishing their own. The Interpreter insists that even when you think you're not involved, you're involved. Run from the world, and it will find you.

ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM

Directed by Alex Gibney

Words don't just describe reality, they transform it. If you doubt this thesis, see Alex Gibney's muckraking documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which proves it so expertly that the film's missteps don't hurt as much as they should.

The film depicts a Fortune 500 company infected by a moral cancer that started at the top and metastasized downward. The disease appeared as early as 1987, when CEO Ken Lay caught executives in the company's Valhalla, NY, division skimming company funds and gambling huge sums on energy futures without authorization, then looked at their earnings statements and upped their trading limits rather than firing them.

Over the next 10 years, Lay and his minions circulated Valhalla's lessons throughout the company. The infection was spread through language. From the late 1980s through the company's 2001 bankruptcy filing, Enron's top bosses used flattery, shell games, euphemisms and B-school mumbo-jumbo to create an alternate universe with no rules and no guilt, counting theoretical future profits as actual profits, then selling the scam to gullible journalists, analysts and stockholders as "mark to market accounting" and "hypothetical future value accounting." In February 2001, two days after Fortune magazine questioned their profit statements, Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Skilling, the Yoda of bullshit, justified the company's accounting as "a good black box" and vowed to make Enron "The World's Leading Company." A year later, a shareholders' lawsuit called Enron what it was: a Ponzi scheme.

Some low-level employees absorbed their bosses' pirate ethics. From Enron's 2001 bankruptcy filing until its 2003 demise-a vicious twilight in which Enron raped California's deregulated utility market, hobbled Gov. Gray Davis and masterminded Arnold Schwarzenegger's coup-by-recall-shirtsleeved Enron day traders were empowered to shut down plants for a hours at a time, inflaming demand and forcing the state to import Enron-supplied power at jacked-up prices. Gibney nails the company's trickle-down treachery with taped phone calls that catch traders chortling over California's despair. "There would be ample supply available at the right fucking price," one says, sounding like a Deadwood character. Another starts to describe a shady moneymaking opportunity as a theft, then settles on "arbitrage."

Working from the same-titled book by Fortune reporters Bethany Maclean and Peter Elkind (who was my editor at Dallas Observer from 1991-95), Gibney has devised a corporate autopsy. He has unearthed damning camcorder footage from stockholder meetings and conducted revealing interviews with reporters and key Enron figures (including former executive Amanda Martin Brock and ex-traders Colin Whitehead and Mike Muckleroy).

In light of these strengths, the film didn't need to open with a Dateline-style reenactment of Enron executive Cliff Baxter's suicide (a sad but pointless tangent), nor did it need to grub for easy laughs with smartass music cues (for instance, following a quote about "the magic of the marketplace" with "That Old Black Magic"). The director's embrace of Roger & Me clichés-a tendency displayed in too many recent documentaries, Gibney's otherwise righteous The Trials of Henry Kissinger among them-encourages viewers to feel superior to villains and victims alike. Corporate fraud is a high crime, but piling-on is a creative misdemeanor. Guilty parties need not be framed.