Movie Review:

The Terminal

    The Belgian cartoonist Hergé was once asked, late in life, what the idea for his next Tintin story was going to be, and he said that he wanted to set the entire narrative within an airport, explaining how he found it fascinating how much of humanity can come together in such a small space.  Hergé never actually used the idea, but an examination of the same feeling creeps into Steven Spielberg's latest film, The Terminal.  Most of us can identify with Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks)'s plight as an exaggeration of the delays we've all experienced at one time or another; the sense of helplessness is always palpable when you can't get to where you're going but also have no real way of returning to where you were coming from.

    Of course, Navorski's story (loosely based on the plight of Merhan Nasseri, an Iranian who, due to lost papers and various bureaucratic hangups, has been living in Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport since 1988) is more than a small exaggeration of that feeling.  A stranded traveler could take a shuttle to an airport hotel; Navorski, officially a citizen of nowhere as his country hashes out a military coup, is forbidden by airport security to leave the international terminal at JFK.  Making do the best he can, Navorski takes up residence at Gate 67 (which is under construction and thus out of the way of normal airport traffic), learns serviceable English, and makes a few friends among the workers at the airport.  Interestingly, both The Terminal and the 1993 French film Tombés du ciel chose to adapt Nasseri's story in relatively comedic fashion.  The story itself seems to lend an air of desperation to the proceedings, but the filmmakers do their best to moderate it.

    Unfortunately, that's the point at which The Terminal begins to break down.  While the concept itself is interesting and the universal truths lurking in the background have the potential to be poignant, the film ruins a lot of the positives by botching the execution.  For one thing, it largely eschews recognizably human characters, choosing instead to populate its microcosmic world with a host of rather silly caricatures, from the "vindictive authority figure" (head of airport security Frank Dixon, played by Stanley Tucci) to "the foreign guy who says and does funny things" (janitor Gupta Rajan, played by Kumar Pallana) to the "forced love interest" (flight attendant Amelia Warren, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones).  It's not that humor is totally uncalled for, but there's no real evidence that the humor here is supposed to be satirical, and that's the only way it could really work.  Absent that excuse, the way the characters interact feels phony in too large a percentage of the scenes.

    Then there are the plots it puts the characters in.  Navorski's relationship with Amelia is most interesting for how it doesn't end, and Amelia is a very strangely written character - one who practically seems intended to give flight attendants a bad name.  (Her routine appears to be: fly for two weeks, arrive in New York, sleep with a married man whom she encourages not to divorce his wife, complain about it to strangers, then fly away again.)  In a more serious film, Amelia might be an interesting character study, but her place in The Terminal is questionable, stuck in an oddly minimalist subplot in the middle of a much more standard comedy/drama.

    Other plots have problems too.  Navorski helps hook up a lovelorn food service worker (Enrique Cruz, played by Diego Luna) with an INS agent (Dolores Torres, played by Zoe Saldana), but it's another strangely written plot - from what we are shown, Cruz merely loves Torres from afar, attempting to work up the nerve to ask her out and using Viktor to gather information about her.  Yet later, Viktor presents Torres with a ring from Cruz, and she greets her mystery man at the Sbarro with the ring firmly in place.  For us, however, this is the first time they've met, and while it has been established that Torres knows Viktor was chatting her up on behalf of someone else, it strains credulity to think this plot would ever play out in real life as it does on screen.

    Of course, The Terminal is a Hollywood movie, and attacking it for things that a lot of Hollywood movies have done over the years seems a trifle unfair (heck, ABC ran Dharma and Greg for five years based on the premise of two people getting married just after meeting each other).  Regardless, is it too much to ask that The Terminal have a character who behaves as a real person might?  Chi McBride's maintenance worker Joe Mulroy probably comes the closest, and he's given very little to do.  Even Navorski, the supposed anchor of the film, does some rather strange things, like random construction work in the middle of the night.

    Despite all its flaws, though, The Terminal is not that bad of a movie to watch.  It is certainly skillfully directed with Spielberg at the helm, and John Williams' score melts rather pleasantly into the background.  The performances are for the most part good, even if the characters they're filling out aren't.  The set design is impressive.  Enough of the jokes are well-executed to keep the audience laughing for most of the film.  Still, it could have been so much more.

    The problem with The Terminal isn't that the story of Viktor Navorski isn't worth telling - it's that it was worth telling better.  C+

The Terminal is a Dreamworks Pictures release.  Rated for brief language and drug references.