Flak Magazine: Review of The Terminal, 07.14.04

The set-up of The Terminal couldn't be more perfect for Steven Spielberg: A traveler from a former Eastern Bloc country escapes civil war to find peace and hope in America, but due to a bureaucratic loophole and an overlording administrator's refusal to bend the rules, this everyman is stuck in the limbo of an airport terminal. Loosely based on a true story, sci-fi premise-master Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, The Truman Show, Simone) fashions a story so layered that, in the hands of a director as talented as Spielberg, it seems capable of being a great film. On one level, there's the human interest of a man trying to make his way in the foreign land; on another, the irony of basic survival among the modern world's technological advances; further still, there's the commentary on American culture's pervasive impersonality. The film dips into the political, following the plight of a man who shares our immigrant forefathers' great hope in America while being shut out by a xenophobic bureaucracy. And, like in The Truman Show, there's a pop-religious take, where the most awkward-feeling place in the modern world explores the concept of purgatory in a literalist sense.

For the movie's first half-hour, it looks as if Spielberg is making a more subdued Minority Report-type summer movie. Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) arrives at JFK, but gets rudely ushered into the terminal to wait as his country descends into civil war. Homeland Security agent Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), a bureaucrat with, yes, a God complex, watches his every move on a series of monitors, recalling both Minority Report and The Truman Show. The film seems pointed toward themes both Spielberg and Niccol have explored better than any other filmmakers in the last few years: morality in the struggle between man, technology and the realities of the modern world. This time, Navorski, from the faraway land of Krakozhia, is left helpless in a sterilized dreamscape of modern convenience. "What I can do here?", asks the English-deficient and impoverished Navorski. "Well," comes the reply, "you can shop" — indeed, it's the only option. Spielberg ends the first act with an image of Navorski, frightened and alone, swamped in a mass of bustling bodies and neon advertisements.

The leads us to the strongest part of the film, in which Navorski learns to live in the terminal. Spielberg — perhaps the most plagiarized filmmaker in Hollywood — does a little borrowing himself: Navorski adapts to the terminal in the same way Hanks' Chuck Nolan survives the island in Cast Away. In fact, Hanks adopts virtually the same methods of that film (directed by Spielberg protegé Robert Zemeckis) for this one. The basic processes of sleeping and eating are made into humorous dramas of discovery, drawing the audience into the man's plight. Starving and desperate, Navorski resorts to a disgusting crackers and ketchup "sandwich" (condiments are free in the food court), and the disgustingness and desperation is played for laughs like Nolan eating the raw crab on the beach. Navorski fashions a bed in an unused portion of the terminal and discovers how to make money by gathering abandoned baggage carriers and collecting the quarter deposits. He even begins to draw on the walls, as Nolan did on the rocks of his island. There's little dialogue here; Hanks uses his skills as a physical comedian to make us laugh as he adapts to his new world. Few other actors could pull this off without erring too far to either slapstick or overwrought dramatics; in fact, after watching Navorski navigate the terminal for 30 minutes, you can almost forget that you're watching Tom Hanks using a faux-Russian accent.

All the while, Dixon (Stanley Tucci) observes Navorski like Christof keeping tabs on Truman Burbank — there's even a scene with Navorski outwitting a survellience camera while Dixon's frustration mounts. "Why won't he just walk out the door?" Dixon asks. As in The Truman Show, the everyman antagonizes the God figure when he asserts his humanity by choosing not to play to the script, ironically agitating God by following God's own rules. "America is closed, no? Then I will wait." says Navorski. Navorski, like Truman, seems to exist solely to point out the loopholes and paradoxes in our perception of God's plan — a human rebuttal to Calvinism. Navorski is told by Dixon, "You are free … to go within the confines of the terminal." Dixon wants defiance because if Navorski would just walk out the door, the INS would nab him and it would be out of his hands. In fact, the Dixon character is more like an angry Saint Peter figure, trapping Navorski between the heaven of America and the hell of his war-torn homeland.

Where Cast Away is an existential drama, the obvious "terminal" metaphor gives this film a more natural religious angle — while it was difficult to ignore the hokiness of Nolan's sacred "angel wings" Fed Ex box, the "terminal" actually embodies the concept. The table is set for a multi-layered exploration of faith, religion, America, globalization, commercialism, "homeland security" and, ultimately, man's place in the modern world. But then — strangely and tragically — Spielberg veers off course. The story Niccol developed seems to end, substituted for a screenplay co-written by Catch Me If You Can scribe Jeff Nathanson and ex-Bush dummer Sacha Gervasi. Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) breaks her heel, and Navorski helps her on her way. He falls in love and tries to plan all sorts of funny and wacky ways to woo her. The rest of the movie is simply that: Navorski and the rest of his mates in the terminal find love and happiness. Sure, there's drama, but the movie leaves all the higher metaphors behind and zeros in on the heartstrings.

For those who love Spielberg — and who have defended his flawed sense of sentimentality — The Terminal becomes painful to watch. As soon as cinematographer Janusz Kaminski floods sunlight over Zeta-Jones from the terminal windows, you can feel Spielberg losing his grip on his movie. There's the fleeting hope that Amelia might be some sort of redeeming angel (not a great idea, but at least consistent with the motif), but Spielberg just turns his movie into a sub-Francois Truffaut romance, with composer John Williams even aping the melodies of Truffaut collaborator Georges Delerue. It's well-known that Spielberg is a great admirer of Truffaut (enough to cast him and his awkward English in Close Encounters of the Third Kind), but this is not the time nor the place for an homage to the French New Wave. This is time for Minority Report-deep, multi-leveled Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. It doesn't seem like Spielberg ran out of ideas or couldn't find a way to end his movie — he just chooses to trot out this tickly faux-French score and make Navorski an unabashed hero to his motley crew.

With this decision, the film swerves into sentimentalist airspace. Tom Hanks cashes in every last chip of his audience lovability and still doesn't save the movie. Spielberg exploits Hanks' everyman appeal just as he did in Saving Private Ryan: We know nothing of Navorski until late in the film, and then the knowledge comes off more as dupe than a revelation, as it did when Hanks' Col. Frank Miller averted a mutiny in his corps by telling everyone that he's a schoolteacher from Pennsylvania. Worse, Navorski's character arc takes him from human survivor to angelic, sentimental hero; he's so kindhearted that he matches up an airport janitor and a passport clerk (including a romantic dinner with convenience-store roses and deluxe airport food). Spielberg tests our tolerance for treacle when Navorski creates a giant fountain mosaic for his love, and none of the building supervisors seem to care. In fact, at one point every damn terminal employee just leaves their stores and follows his antics — he's a universally sympathetic, almost Gumpian figure, a Radio of the airport. Heck, he's such a bleeding heart that he sacrifices his opportunity to get out of the airport to help a poor Russian man who came to America to get Canadian drugs to ease the pain of his dying father. Strangely, Navorski's knowledge of Russian (Homeland Security apparently fired all the airport's interpreters) must have given him some sort of diplomatic powers: Dixon just accepts Navorski's translation, even though he knows it's a lie, and sends the guy on his way … and then decides, because he's the heartless bureaucrat, to punish Navorski for it. That's what Spielberg decides to do with this great metaphor he's built.

Essentially, Spielberg miscalculates what the real relationship in the movie should be: It shouldn't be between Navorski and Amelia, but between Navorski and Dixon. As we learn more about Amelia's struggles with married men (you see, she's been waiting on a phone call from "the one" for seven years, as if her love life is "terminal"), this flat, generic, cliché character begins to dominate the film. This is fatal: The Truman Show and Minority Report justify their Hollywood blockbuster budgets — the money is necessary to construct persuasive films that explore the big questions of the day while including the mainstream audience in the conversation. Here, Spielberg constructs an entire airport terminal so Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones can bond and Spielberg can offer his vision of a kinder, gentler Department of Homeland Security. He also drags his movie on 45 minutes too long just to make sure we feel the pain and triumph of Viktor Navorski of Krakosia. The great director squanders an opportunity to make a great movie. He's lucky that the movie has underperformed at the box office, that it might force him to re-evaluate his success. Mr. Spielberg, we love that you can find humanity in an inhumane world, but please don't rub it in our faces for an hour too long. It's us, not Viktor Navorski, who's stuck in The Terminal.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)