The Interpreter

Back in 2004, I used to write movie reviews for the USM student newspaper, the "Student Printz". Because I occasionally feel lazy, and it seems a shame that all of five people ever read these, I've decided to repost them here, in the original versions that I emailed to my editor, Noel, all those years ago.

Sometimes the distances that actors and actresses travel in terms of characters is monumental. Take “The Interpreter’s” primary stars: Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn. It was less than a decade ago that Kidman was following George Clooney around trying to disarm nuclear weapons in “The Peacemaker”, and not that long ago that Penn’s Spicoli was ordering pizzas to Mr. Hand’s class in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”. “The Interpreter” shares this kind of idea: it’s a classic feeling film, very personal, small cast with a Hitchcock-like plot of a geopolitical who dunnit. But in modern times, this classic kind of movie is much more of a supercharged tale of revenge and political suspense.

“The Interpreter” opens up with Silvia Broome (Nicole Kidman), a United Nations interpreter, going to the U.N. general assembly sound room late at night to retrieve some personal items when she hears a conversation regarding an assassination on President Zuwanie, the genocidal leader of the small African nation of Matobo. The Secret Service dispatches Tobin Keller and Dot Woods (Sean Penn and Catherine Keener) two agents with Foreign Dignitary Protection. As they investigate the possibility of assassination, they turn up an enormous amount of dirt on Broome, who used to be a revolutionary in Matobo following the death of her parents. Keller may not believe her at first and has more mounting suspicions, but there are definitely dark hands at work leading to mysterious masked men and ruthless assassinations of President Zuwanie’s only remaining opponents.

The melting pot of New York City and the global unity of the United Nations building act only as a stage for dual plot of both personal and global struggles for forgiveness and revenge. Both Broome and Keller have semi-dark histories of loved ones lost to tragedy, which focus both of their current efforts to try and save people. These interpersonal struggles act to mirror the bigger plot as to whether or not Zuwanie should be assassinated to better the people of the nation he has oppressed.

A movie with a plot about political turmoil would have been traditionally treated as a sufficient film, but apparently someone felt that additional, deeper subplots were necessary to drive the concept. Though the presence of these subplots never brings the film to a “halt”, they do serve to drag the plot down to a “yield”. This isn’t helped at all by a possible romantic interest between Keller and Broome. What really drives this movie is the international turmoil, as it is far more interesting than morbid lists Broome’s brother kept of dead Matobans or Penn’s constant look of pensive severity. This film is greatly benefited by strong supporting cast, including Keener and Jesper Christensen as a Dutch ex-mercenary and security officer to Zuwanie.

“The Interpreter” sums up to being a pretty good movie – not necessarily “fun”, but definitely interesting and exciting. The theme of pacifism is an interesting complement to a film that highlights some of America’s biggest contemporary fears as well as some neat action sequences. You can always count on a movie like “The Interpreter” to make you feel good: the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and hopefully the world is made a better place. At least until next week.

Character Arrested Development

I still occasionally get emails from my old college improv troupe, and I'm always excited to read ones where they're discussing improv theory; I love it primarily for nostalgia, but also because I like reading how the philosophies of people I trained and performed with have evolved. For a lot of college troupes in the hinterlands, each group is its own little microcosm of improv exploration, and as a result, they're generally limited to things they learn through books on the subject.
 

My favorite pops up like clockwork once a semester: the "character development" email. It goes like this: "we had a rough show, we need to work on fundamentals, so next week we're going to go over character development." But why do we pick character development over things like scenework, being "in-the-moment", or a bajillion other skills? It's the improv scapegoat. Had a bad show? It was probably bad character development. Why? Because I have no idea what it means, so I probably don't have it. It's a term that falls into the same category of "process development", "synergy", and "paradigm shift" of abstract things that sound great on paper, but have no real definition. I don't even remember how the term entered into our vernacular; I've never read it in a book or heard any teacher use that exact term anytime since. It was always just there.

For years, I broke the term down to define it. "What is character development?" someone might ask me on an improv game show. "Why, it's the development of a character arc throughout the course of the scene!" I would answer proudly. While it's true that that kind of character development (which is probably more likely to be called emotional development, scene development, or some other such acting term I'm too ignorant to know) is important, that's not what's meant by character development. The problem with trying to do it that way is we get a bunch of scenes where person A is trying to change person B in three minutes! 

Our character development practice became, every semester, two hours of scenes about breakup, love, or death. They were boring and uninteresting, and we would immediately go back to doing other things the next week.
What we all meant (but were unable to articulate, and, even worse, unable to teach) was creating rich, unique characters. Characters that were more than just a funny voice or a strange bodily affliction. What we wanted was to create characters that the audience would be interested in long enough to want to see a character arc.  (Something compounding the problem: improv shows like "Whose Line" rarely, if ever have richly defined characters.  Their scenes tend to, unfortunately, be just a funny voice or strange bodily affliction.)

So if we're not trying to negotiate a character change, what is character development actually supposed to be? The now-me, on the same gameshow, would answer "creating a character on the fly that can survive on his/her own in the universe we've created". What you need to take away is this: a character needs at minimum, two things to survive. One, a point of view, and two, a want. The other stuff (occupation, mannerisms, etc.) is good, but you've got to leave that to be discovered. And most importantly, just relax in the scene and remember that this is the universe that your character inhabits and to try to react as that character would.