Review: "The Terminal"
Directed by Steven Spielberg
3 stars (out of 4)
Human interest stories are nothing new for America's most famous director. Although Peter Biskind's claim that Spielberg created the blockbuster format may have some credibility, pinning the death of modern cinema on one man is a vast oversimplification of the problem in the hope of finding an understandable solution: Hollywood is a business, and although Spielberg has never failed to capitalize on this, he has in doing so created some of the most memorable moments on film in the past quarter-century. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (77) was a man torn apart; E.T. (82) was a boy learning of life and love; Schindler's List (93) was a plea for peace; and Saving Private Ryan (98) a thought-provoking, if somewhat truncated, meditation on the worth of one man's life.
It is from this history of human drama coupled with shrewd commercialism that The Terminal is born. Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) lands at JFK International Airport in January 2004, armed with a guidebook and sheet of undoubtedly phonetically spelled phrases like "Yellow taxi cab, please" and "Keep the change." The airport rejects his passport, though, at which point Viktor is taken to see Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), who works at JFK for the Department of Homeland Security. During his flight, Viktor's home nation of Krakozhia erupted in civil war, making it impossible for Viktor to obtain a visa and rendering him a citizen only of the planet and none of its countries. Dixon allows Viktor to wait in the international lobby/shopping mall, assuming Viktor will eventually try to leave the airport and become somebody else's problem. However, neither Dixon nor any of the security or retail employees were prepared for Viktor's next move.
He waited.
He didn't try to escape JFK, or rob anybody/thing, or kill anybody/thing, or try to cause any trouble. He simply waited and began to interact with the people in the lobby: janitor Gupta (Kumar Pallana), food service worker Enrique (Diego Luna), baggage handler Joe (Chi McBride), and flight attendant Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones).
Hanks brings the instant charm to Viktor he's shown in each of his characters since the early 1990s. Granted, it's a ripe situation: friendly foreigner in fish-out-of-water tale who befriends coworkers and gets the warm fuzzies for a beautiful woman that finds him irresistible. But Hanks brings a spark of dignity and class to a role other might've simply phoned in. He's really working here, and the payoff makes it look easy.
Fair warning, though: Amelia isn't your typical romantic-comedy love interest, even for Spielberg. Reeling from a lifetime of bad relationships and incurable jetlag, in constant pain because she puts herself there, Amelia is bound to do a hero, especially our hero, as much harm as good. However, when things begin to stretch and tear between the couple, it doesn't feel like either one's a Bad Guy or that they're simply fighting because the writers felt an obstacle was needed on page 100. Things simply happen, for better or worse, as they so often do in Spielberg's films.
Screenwriters Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson have crafted a small, enjoyable tale out of a one-off idea: what if you couldn't leave the airport? Gervasi penned The Big Tease in 1999, and Nathanson wrote both 2002's Catch Me If You Can and 1997's Speed 2: Cruise Control (ouch). The script here is sharp and breezy, if somewhat calculable, but it gets the job done well.
Although his resume tends to favor fantasy or sci-fi, Spielberg, like the best directors, has never contented himself working only in one genre. The Terminal, with an altered script and different helmer, could have been a mediocre or even crass romantic comedy, all cheap jokes and insubstantial relationships. But the film instead manages to make Viktor relatable while tiptoeing around outright pandering. Spielberg has crafted another world where people support each other through trials, a rare site to see done so well.
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