Originally Published 7/5/04
The Terminal
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson, from a story by Andrew Niccol and Sacha Gervasi
Producers: Laurie MacDonald, Walter F. Parkes, Steven Spielberg
Stars: Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci, Chi McBride, Diego Luna, Barry Shabaka Henley, Kumar Pallana, Zoe Saldana
One of the dangers of The Terminal, Steven Spielberg’s slight but irresistibly sweet little trifle of a movie, is that you can want too badly for it to be Saying Something. It’s true that, in the story of innocent well-meaning Eastern European Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), who finds himself forced to live for months in the international terminal of a New York airport, words like “fable”, “allegory”, and “microcosm” do apply.
But to focus on that while watching the movie is to miss its many charms, which lie not in its symbols but in its very recognizable, very human quirks. One woman seated near me chuckled at the appearance of a Dept. of Homeland Security logo, like it was meant as some kind of sight gag about the relative intelligence of the security personnel. But that shortchanges the character of Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), who runs the security detail at the terminal.
In a lesser movie he would have just been the villain, a simple, scowly killjoy, well within Tucci’s range and willingness to ham things up. If you watch carefully, though, you’ll see that little aspects of his inner life are still revealing themselves up to his very last scene. This is not some incompetent autocrat, this is a man who finds comfort in a system of rules and is actually very good at his job, but finds himself alternately bamboozled, confounded, charmed and frustrated by Viktor Navorski’s refusal to behave like the cynical sneaks his system is designed to deal with.
In one scene he offers Navorski a way out: simply say that he has a fear of returning home, and he can be welcomed onto US soil as a refugee seeking asylum. But Navorski cannot lie; how could he fear his home? Dixon is flummoxed, grabbing for anything he can use to plug into the proper form – “But aren’t you afraid of something?”
“I am afraid for…ghosts,” Navorski offers helpfully.
The simple quirk of an unfailingly trustworthy man bumping up against a world built around mistrust is mined time and time again for laughs by Spielberg and Hanks, who have created in Navorski a Holy Innocent. One can imagine this character with his own series of two-reelers back in the silent era, unwittingly putting one over on the establishment in situation after situation simply by being his own direct self.
It is a sign of a great performance when you look at an actor, especially a movie star, and you start thinking of them as their character and not themselves. When I laugh at The Terminal, it’s not because I am thinking – Boy, is Tom Hanks funny. It’s because Viktor Navorski just did something funny.
Here he arrives in New York on a mission that he does not divulge eagerly, but involves a nearby Ramada Inn and a battered Planters Peanuts tin he carries everywhere. Unbeknownst to him, there’s been a military coup in his home country of Krakozia, and the United States has not bestowed any kind of recognition on the new government. His passport thus invalidated, he cannot enter the United States, but neither can he leave, again because he lacks a valid passport. This was inspired by the actual story of a man who has now lived for well over a decade in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport, just in case anyone finds this too precious to be true.
And so the weeks go by, and Navorski builds himself a nesting place, gets a job, becomes well-acquainted with the food court’s many options, and starts touching the lives of the little community that keeps the airport humming. He brokers a romance between a meal cart driver (Diego Luna) and the security officer for whom he pines (Zoe Saldana). He pierces through to the secret sadness that fuels janitor Gupta’s (Kumar Pallana) misanthropic pranks.
He finds himself continually bumping into, first accidentally, more often later by design, a harried flight attendant named Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones). She’s a woman uncomfortably facing the expiration of her youth, and her own destructive romantic tendencies (especially her inability to end an affair with a married man), but, as with everyone else in the movie, something about Navorski makes her stop for a minute, and see everything a little more clearly.
Zeta-Jones, both in her performance and the way she’s shot, is a little jarring, a little too manipulative Hollywood. She swans into scenes with gauzy close-ups, breathy emoting, and over-emphatic music, and puts an uncomfortable tarnish on Spielberg’s charming bauble. It’s really a shame, since on paper her character is perfectly conceived, an intrusion of real-world messiness into Viktor’s simple philosophy. And it does comes to a conclusion that, for this movie, is just right.
This airport terminal is a living, breathing place, an extraordinary set designed by Alex McDowell to accommodate the jungle of walkways and escalators, and the stores travelers have become so familiar with – Brookstone and Starbucks and all the rest.
Spielberg’s regular cinematographer since Schindler’s List, the brilliant Janusz Kaminski, sets his camera free in this space and once again provides beauty wherever it is asked of him. Even the sight of mustard squeezing through the holes in a cracker (Navorski must subsist on condiments before he finds sources of revenue) has a certain colorful perfection to it. His fluidity in providing a distinctive visual compliment to every type of story Spielberg has told in the last decade has played no small part in the quality of this phase of his career.
In the end, it’s a beautiful, unforgettable airport, where weddings can take place, a famous diva’s underthings can become the high-stakes prize in a poker game, and stories can quickly spread about one man’s good deeds. But it is still just an airport. Spielberg, so confident with action and science fiction, has here achieved the same faith in his abilities in a far more delicate genre. It’s a human comedy, rarely forced, calibrated to pull laughs from you at the most unexpected moments, and at the last, indelibly touching.