The Terminal

by Shari L. Rosenblum

A promotion, a page, a way in, a way out, someone to slip and fall and make our day: we are all waiting for something. Patiently, angrily and with great bursts of energy, we wait. In anticipation, at the precipice, in anterooms, lobbies, and airports, we rap our fingers, tap our toes, and wait. Waiting is the human condition frothily exposed, exfoliated, and reduced to trivialities in the Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks collaboration, The Terminal (“Life is Waiting,” the tagline reads). But if you are waiting for something to inspire you, make you think, or even move you to tears, you may just have to wait a little longer.

 Written by Sacha Gervasi ( The Big Tease) and Jeff Nathanson (Catch Me If You Can) from a story by Gervasi and Andrew Niccol (The Truman Show, Gattaca), The Terminal chronicles the comings and goings of a traveler from Eastern Europe who arrives in the U.S. only to discover that he can neither move forward nor go back. Hanks, with Russianic accent and Eastern Bloc poundage, plays Viktor Navorski -- a post-Cold War reinvention of Philip Nolan -- indefinitely delayed (with such precautions as will prevent his escape) in the stunningly designed, and evidently quite livable, made-for-the-movie International Terminal of New York's JFK airport. There's been a coup in his native land of Krakozhia, and he's waiting for the war to end.

Branded “unacceptable” by the airport's acting head of Homeland Security, Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci, overacting “officious” in a style better suited to his characterization of killer Muerte in Undercover Blues), America closed to him, the homeless Krakozhian sets about to making himself at home in limbo, traversing the terminal the very first morning of his detention in a thick Krakozhian terry robe improbably included among the necessities in his minimalist luggage.

The terminal itself, crafted for the film by production designer Alex McDowell (Minority Report), is a fantastic, bustling fiction of cleanliness and possibility that outshines anything in the text or its premises. Infused with light from all the right angles for cinematographer Janusz Kaminski to capture and create mood, it is an idealized hub of American culture. Intended by the overreaching filmmakers to be a microcosm of the nation that inspires dreams (as they attest in interviews), it is inhabited by a pseudo-sociologist's idea of the American melting pot -- good-natured outsiders who come together through and across imposed classist hierarchies. In paint-by-number multiculturalism, we get the African-American baggage handler (Chi McBride), the Latin food service worker (Diego Luna), the Indian janitor (Kumar Pullana), and assorted other disenfranchised stereotypes of the airport, to take their comrade in arms, Navorski, under their wings. Modern mosaic though they are set up to be, they are to a man (and woman) embarrassingly conceived, underwritten, overdirected, and generally flat.

Navorski – despite a mysterious can of peanuts that he kisses goodnight (he says it's got “jazz” inside) -- is remarkably resourceful, as such fictional characters always are. With a little help from his friends, he soon has the world at his fingertips. The grasp of English he was unable to manage while planning his trip to these shores (prepared sentences his only aid) comes to him with amazing ease when he can open Borders (yes, really). Food, clothing, and even work follow easily from there. When he meets an ill-advisedly named flight attendant (“Amelia”) with a fixation on Napoleon and Josephine (Catherine Zeta-Jones, awkward in the role of the unappreciated other woman), it looks like love, too, is his to have in this mini-mock-metropolis. Though too law-abiding to sneak through the ever-opening gates to New York City , even when invited to do so, he is fortunately quite comfortable with petty acts of theft, trespass, tax evasion, medical contraband and destruction of public property, and this suits him and the film rather well. In traditional Hanks style, the actor approaches everything -- from the unlikely to the ludicrous -- with a conviction of character. It is a likable, but unexceptional performance. The smugness is only barely perceptible.

Clichés are reinforced, nine months pass and the film comes to term. Hopes are reborn; lives are changed; there's a decent immigration joke; and everyone does what's called for when the American dream is on the line...they buck the American system. The plot plods to a disappointing finish. And then, I suppose, we wait.

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene