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Terminal, The
(2004)
Starring:
Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci
Director: Steven Spielberg
Rating: PG-13
Distributor:
DreamWorks SKG
Release Date:
06.18.04
Review
Posted: 06.22.04
Spoilers:
None
By
Gregory L. Amato
What more ironic place to be stranded than JFK international airport?
Surrounded by connections to the entire world and with just a simple
door leading to New York itself, Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks,
The Ladykillers,
Catch Me If You Can) can see all the possibilities but can’t
go anywhere in Steven Spielberg’s latest film, The Terminal.
After arriving at JFK from Krakozhia, a small country supposedly
bordering Russia, Viktor can’t be processed through because during his
flight his country technically ceased to exist after a military coup.
This is all explained to him by Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci,
The Core,
Road to Perdition), a Homeland Security employee in charge of
helping passengers in special situations. Without a country, Viktor
has no valid passport, and without a passport, he can neither return
to his country nor enter the United States.
Dixon therefore lets Viktor loose into the terminal with instructions
that he cannot leave, fully believing that he will make a quick exit
and become “somebody else’s problem.” Whether he escapes or is
arrested does not matter, as long as Dixon’s hands are clean and his
promotion intact.
But Viktor won’t leave. Stranded and living out of an unused gate, he
walks around the terminal in his bathrobe, returns carts for quarters
so he can showcase product placement (oops! I mean so that he can buy
food), and makes friends with everyone he meets, including the
beautiful but scatterbrained stewardess Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones,
Intolerable Cruelty,
Traffic). Most notable however is the paranoid Indian janitor
Gupta (Kumar Pallana,
Duplex,
The Royal Tenenbaums), whose favorite part of the day consists
of washing floors and then sitting back to watch people slip and fall
down on them.
Days turn into weeks and weeks into months. Viktor adapts to each new
challenge and succeeds with Horatio Algier-like good will. When he
can’t return carts, he’s approached with food in exchange for
information on an attractive security officer. When he needs money, he
finds a job that pays him under the table. Unable to tell even a white
lie, Viktor refuses to say that he is afraid of returning to his
country in order to get asylum. Trying to find some middle ground with
the bureaucrat, he instead offers his fears of ghosts, sharks, and
Dracula as possibilities, but to no avail.
It
might be tempting to read Hanks’ character the respectful but ignorant
foreigner, especially with his comical command of English played for
laughs so often. Not so. Viktor is resourceful, industrious,
optimistic, and independent. In other words, he might be considered
the ideal American. Contrasted with Tucci’s by-the-book,
upwardly-mobile government bureaucrat, Spielberg may be giving just a
subtle hint that it’s not through personal success that makes us
successful human beings, but through helping others. While Viktor
brings friendship to the people around him, Dixon is stuck in a
quagmire of his own making: Good at his job, but unable break his own
routines of following the rules, he’s made the terminal into a prison
for himself, and he has considerably fewer friends than the
good-natured Viktor. “You could learn something from Viktor Navorski,”
says Dixon’s old boss to him. One has to wonder if Spielberg is asking
America to do the same.
The Terminal’s
theme of bureaucracy versus humanity is both its blessing and its
curse. If Spielberg was using it to give the film depth (and it does),
it also makes for more than two hours of the sappiest and most
unrealistic characters since the abominable AI. Of the two love
stories involved in the plot, neither makes much sense in the way they
turn out, and loose ends are left conveniently and unsatisfyingly
tidied up by the end of the film. Running at more than two hours,
wasn’t there time to make these elements believable? Perhaps, though
it seems more likely that this was secondary to the “feel-goodness” of
the film.
Too bad. The Terminal is more than silly plays on English words
(“These are Cher’s panties,” “So, we share panties?”), but
unfortunately some of it is lost in a mire of over-sentimentality and
fanciful love stories.
Film Rating:
ęęę1/2
(out of 5)
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