“The Interpreter”:  Sean Penn’s U.N. Mash Note
April 22, 2005
By Debbie Schlussel

The last time I wrote about Jeff Spicoli a/k/a Sean Penn, he sent me an e-mail calling me the c-word.

In the past, Penn reportedly shot reporters with a squirt gun filled with his urine, so I got off easy.  Classy guy.

I critiqued Penn’s absurd interview in the thankfully defunct Talk Magazine.  It was just months after 9/11, and Spicoli was deluded from smoking too much pot, again.  He didn’t just insist that President Bush, Rupert Murdoch, Howard Stern, and Bill O’Reilly were as bad as Osama Bin Laden and Hitler.  They were worse.

Since then, as we now know, Penn transformed himself into failed emissary to Iraq—a Baghdad Spicoli a la Hanoi Jane.

But now Penn’s gotten smarter.  His propaganda doesn’t work when he’s playing himself in real life.

So he’s turned to the silver screen to do it for him, in “The Interpreter,” debuting in theaters today.  The United Nations is the setting, but it’s also the main star of the film.  Penn and Nicole Kidman are merely the co-stars.

As for promoting the U.N., Leni Reifenstahl (Hitler’s propagandist) couldn’t have done better—even if it’s hard to believe Spicoli as Secret Service Agent.  (When he tries to fake crying, all you can hear is his yearning for “tasty waves and a cool buzz.”)

Just when the U.N.—the bizarre confab of Third World republics and America haters—is getting its due in the media, Director Sydney Pollack comes to the rescue.  “Interpreter”  portrays this fraudulent former League of Nations as the idealistic body it never was and nothing close to the International House of Bozos it’s been for at least half a century.

Kofi Annan is one smart cookie.  After months and months of exposes on the U.N. chief and his son for their scandalous roles in the Oil for Food scam, this long two-hour campaign commercial comes to the rescue.  That explains why Annan gave Pollack—via 9/11 Comissioner and former Democratic Senator Bob Kerry—unprecedented access to the U.N. to film this love letter to Banana Republic Hate-fest Central.

At a meeting with Annan, Pollack promised Anna that “it would not be a movie that exploited the U.N. or the subject of terrorism.”

What he really meant was, “I will portray this august, heavenly institution as a bastion of principle, completely divorced from reality”

Instead of whoring itself out for money in exchange for propping up dictator Saddam Hussein and his barbarism, “Interpreter’s” U.N. is a great hall of freedom and democracy from beginning to end.  Bonus:  The falsely-named International Criminal Court —an illegitimate star chamber used to attack the U.S. and Israel and promote despots—is hailed in this movie, too.

Moviegoers are treated to snippet after snippet of U.N. delegates pontificating on freedom and human rights, as opposed to the hate-America and –Israel speeches you’d really hear there.  And—surprise, surprise—a lot of those speeches are translated from French.  No word on whether pro-Saddam Spicoli and Pollack got Oil for Food fringe benefits from the implicated French in exchange for image repair.

“Interpreter’s” plot entails terrorists allegedly trying to murder a head of state.  Originally, those terrorists were from a fictional Middle Eastern country, according to the Wall Street Journal.  But, after 9/11, the PC police took over, and the terrorists were transformed into Black Africans. 

“We didn’t want to encumber the film in politics in any way,” kowtowed producer Kevin Misher.  Plus, director Pollack promised Kofi Annan that he wouldn’t “exploit” the subject of terrorism.  In this case, “exploit” apparently has the new meaning of “tell the truth.”

Translation:  We couldn’t actually portray terrorists as Arab Muslims, so we decided to portray them as Blacks who blow up buses in New York.    “After 9/11, such an occurrence [blowing up buses] was authentic on every level in the U.S.”

Because everyone knows that Arab Muslims never blew up anything in New York  (attention 3,000 misted people).  They never tried to assassinate any leaders either (hear that, Anwar Saddat?).  The Blacks did it, right?  So much for “authenticity.”  But don’t bet on Hollywood liberals Pollack and Misher being accused of racism.

Also, unlike real life, the U.N. actually does something about the despotic world leader at issue and helps depose him.  Because, as we know, it was the U.N., not the U.S. military, which deposed Saddam Hussein through Oil for Food, “dialogue,” and “diplomacy.”  And, just as in the movie, the U.N. deposed the Black African leader who is committing  ethnic cleansing in his country. 

Too bad that in real life, the Muslim African president of Sudan has virtually erased its entire Black Christian population without the U.N. doing a damn thing.

U.N. and “Interpreter” minions are so thrilled with the final product, they want to make a “West Wing” TV version of the U.N.  Gee, I can hardly wait.

Pollack would have been better off to remake his “Three Days of the Condor” with a U.S. government-Muslim cabal.  Given strong White House ties to Islamists Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan, and White House visits, at their instruction, by Islamic Jihad founder and leader Sami Al-Arian, that would have been a lot more believable than this propaganda piece for pere and fils Annan.

Pollack longs to be like great director Alfred Hitchcock, who also did a U.N. movie, 1959’s “North by Northwest.”  He one-ups the late Hitchcock who was refused U.N. access for his film.  And then he rubs Hitchcock’s face in it, making a Hitchcockian cameo as Penn’s Secret Service boss.

To paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bentsen in the 1988 Vice Presidential debates, I never knew Alfred Hitchcock.  He wasn’t a friend of mine.

But Sidney Pollack, you’re no Alfred Hitchcock.