Hollywood thriller draws focus on Mugabe's brutality

Hollywood thriller draws focus on Mugabe's brutality

NICOLE Kidman chats with UN Secretary General Koffi Annan and his wife Nane at the premiere of the Interpreter in New York

• Zim author Yvonne Vera dies in Canada

By Showbiz Reporter

ZIMBABWEAN President Robert Mugabe's liberator-turned brutal tyrannt persona is dramatised in a new Hollywood thriller starring Nicol Kidman.

Sydney Pollack's "The Interpreter" is a taut and intelligent thriller, centering on Nicole Kidman as an interpreter at the United Nations, and Sean Penn as a Secret Service agent.

The movie is set on a fictional country called Matobo -- Matobo is a south-western district of Matabeleland South which bore the heavy brunt of Mugabe's 1980s genocide in which rights groups say 20 000 people were killed.

The president of Matobo is a brutal tyrannt named Zuwanie, clearly intended to represent Mugabe, also once hailed as a liberator, now using starvation as a political tool.

The story was filmed largely on location in and around the United Nations, including the General Assembly Room; it's the first film given permission to do that. I mention the location because it adds an unstated level of authenticity to everything that happens. There's a scene where a security detail sweeps the building, and it feels like a documentary. Like when Drew Barrymore runs onto the field at Fenway Park in "Fever Pitch," the U.N. scenes provide what Werner Herzog calls "the voodoo of location" -- the feeling of the real thing instead of the artifice of sets and special effects.

The movie has a realism of tone, too. This isn't a pumped-up techno-thriller, but a procedural, in which Secret Service agents Keller (Penn) and Woods (Catherine Keener) are assigned to the U.N. after an interpreter named Silvia Broome (Kidman) overhears a death threat. The threat is against an African dictator named Zuwanie (Earl Cameron), once respected, now accused of genocide. He announces that he will address the General Assembly to defend his policies. The head of the Secret Service (played by Pollack himself) says the last thing the United States needs, at this point in history, is the assassination of a foreign leader on American soil.

Silvia, we learn, grew up in Zuwanie's country, was a supporter of Zuwanie, saw her parents killed, became disillusioned. She speaks many languages, including Ku, the tongue of the (fictional) country of Matobo, and five years ago became a U.N. interpreter.

After she reports the death threat, she expects to be believed. But Keller draws an instant conclusion: "She's lying." A polygraph indicates "she's under stress, but not lying." Is she, or isn't she? We meet a gallery of suspects, including Zuwanie's white security chief and two of his political opponents. Keller looks into Silvia's background, convinced she has reasons for wanting Zuwanie dead, although she says she joined the U.N. because she supports peaceful change.

"Vengeance is a lazy form of grief," she tells the agent, who has some grief and vengeance issues of his own. She also tells him of a custom from Matobo: When a man kills a member of your family and is captured, he is tied up and thrown into the river, and it is up to your family to save him or let him drown. If he drowns, you will have vengeance, but you will grieve all of your days. If you save him, you will be released from your lament.

The flim is admirable in the way it enters the terms of this world -- of international politics, security procedures, shifting motives -- and observes the details of all-night stakeouts, shop talk, and interlocking motives and strategies. More than one person wants Zuwanie dead, and more than one person wants an assassination attempt, which is not precisely the same thing.

In the final scene, Zuwanie, dictator president of Matobo awaits trial in an international court - additional reporting by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Directed by Sydney Pollack. Starring Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn, Catherine Keener, Jesper Christensen, Yvan Attal and Earl Cameron. Running time: 128 minutes. Classified: PG-13 (for violence, some sexual content and brief strong language).
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shapiro@newzimbabwe.com