June 17-24, 2004

movies

Stuck in the Middle

FIGHT OR FLIGHT: Viktor (Tom Hanks) wonders if he left the oven on.

Tom Hanks bides his time in The Terminal.

by Sam Adams

Three-hour layovers notwithstanding, airports are meant to be passed through, not lingered in. The first place you go and the last place you leave, an airport is, however gleaming and well-appointed, a gauntlet, the space between you and where you're going.

Unfortunately for Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), he's not going anywhere. A resident of a (fictitious) former Soviet republic named Krakhozia, he arrives in New York to find that his country no longer exists, at least as far as the U.S. is concerned. A midair coup has turned Viktor's homeland into a nonentity, leaving him, as security chief Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci) puts it, "a citizen of nowhere." There's history, and then there's bureaucracy. As far as Dixon's concerned, Krakhozia never was. Viktor's passport, his visa, are mere scraps of paper, but how to deport him to a hole in the map? Stuck in the birth canal — shades of Minority Report's amniotic seers — Viktor is simply "unacceptable."

Oblivious to the dilemmas, both real and semantic, that he poses to the airport's administration, Viktor does as he's told. He waits. Confined to the "international lounge," Viktor builds himself a home at a disused gate, but spends his days (and most of the movie) roaming between the chain stores that make up the airport's massive, sunlit mall. Viktor falls in line with the immigrant dream, returning baggage carts for quarters and wangling an under-the-table construction job. (Informed of Viktor's wages for the latter, Dixon exclaims, "That's more than I make!") But Viktor's ultimate goal isn't assimilation — like one of Spielberg's past protagonists, he only wants to go home. Eager to remove Viktor before his performance review comes up, Dixon urges him to claim asylum, but Viktor refuses even to feign fear of his homeland. "I no afraid Krakhozia," Hanks says in a thick, Slavic drawl. "Krakhozia home."

As Dixon explains, Viktor has fallen through a "crack" in the system, but the man from crack-ozia is used to living between the lines. It's the terminal's part-time residents who could use a helping hand, from Diego Luna's lovestruck food-service worker to Kumar Pallana's hostile janitor. Viktor abets the former's romance with a pretty immigration officer (Zoe Saldana), whom he dutifully visits each morning (and gets a red "denied" stamp for his trouble), and breaks through the latter's tough shell for a much-needed heart-to-heart. Viktor's most magical talents, though, are reserved for Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a harried flight attendant with a checkered romantic history. Viktor, of course, notices her before she notices him, but eventually he sticks in her memory, and with a few careful misdirections leads her to the conclusion that he must be someone who, like her, has a job requiring constant travel — a contractor, maybe.

Though it doesn't start off as one, The Terminal gradually becomes a fable. It's practically required to, since the machinations required to keep Viktor in his place grow ever less plausible. Denials to the contrary, Viktor's plight is almost certainly based on that of Merhan Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian dissident who has been living in Charles de Gaulle airport since 1988. Nasseri, of course, has good reason not to want to return to his country, but Viktor says he has none. Why, then, does he reject Dixon's offer to turn a blind eye while he walks out the door? "I wait," Viktor says, repeating Dixon's first instructions to him with the loyalty of a faithful mutt. Though The Terminal invariably casts Viktor's persistence in a positive light, there's something slightly inhuman about the fact that he never becomes bitter or enraged. He's a caricature of the perfect immigrant: He's hardworking, self-sufficient and doesn't ask too many questions.

At times, Spielberg seems to be aiming for something like the effervescent social satires of Preston Sturges, particularly when Hanks' acting is at its most broadly comic. (He hasn't done this many pratfalls since The Money Pit.) At others, particularly where Viktor's relationship with Amelia is concerned, he doles out the schmaltz like a 10-year-old at a sundae bar. It's as if he wants to make a thoughtful entertainment, but doesn't want to get caught doing it. It's easy to pinpoint the moments that will set Spielberg-haters off — a decibel meter rigged to John Williams' score would be a perfect early warning system — but his conviction that movies can reach for a wide audience and still be about something ought to be applauded, not denigrated, especially because he doesn't feel the reflexive need to go low-budget to demonstrate his seriousness. The people who griped that Minority Report's dystopian satire of invasive advertising was undercut by the use of real products will miss the point of The Terminal's logo-studded backdrop as well. But its shiny, disinfected world is hardly an advertisement: Each lit-up Starbucks sign is like a beacon guiding Viktor into the rocks, a cruel reminder of the world he can't access. Ultimately, though, Spielberg can't withhold fulfillment from Viktor, any more than he can from his audience, which is what makes The Terminal a successful fable and a failed social comment.

The Terminal Directed by Steven Spielberg A DreamWorks release Opens Friday at area theaters
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