It’s sometimes forgotten that director Steven Spielberg is also a screenwriter, and one of the uncredited secrets to his gigantic success is his ability to spot great stories. Amazing Stories, the anthology television series that he created and produced in the mid-’80s, crystalized in 30-minute episodes this unerring gift for finding terrific material.
The Terminal is another of those amazing stories and it emphasizes another of the writer-director-producer’s innate talents: his skill at focusing on the small and human amidst the gigantic and impersonal. Here, in yet another of the Spielberg underdog films (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and Duel are the best), Tom Hanks portrays Viktor Navorski, who has arrived at the JFK airport in New York from a fictional Eastern European country just as a revolution has occurred. Viktor cannot enter the U.S. and he can’t go back home until the country officially recognizes the U.S. (it sounds crazy-realistic—the kind of conundrum upon which presidential elections are decided, for example).
Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci in a canny performance), the official charged with dealing with the problem, just wants Viktor to go away and he instructs his head of security (Chi McBride in a droll turn) to give Hanks a handful of restaurant and store coupons, and advise him to wait in the international terminal until things are resolved. ‘There’s only one thing you can do here—shop,’ the guard says to Hanks, turning him loose.
Hanks is then Cast Away again—with his isolation compounded by his character’s inability to barely understand, speak or read English. But like the character he played in that not terribly good desert isle picture, Viktor uses his ingenuity to survive and thrive, setting an example for All Humanity in the process. Viktor becomes sort of a Eastern European fairy godfather to everyone he meets, sprinkling heart and simple wisdom as he plays matchmaker, sympathizer, and bashful suitor to Amelia, the lovelorn stewardess played with no particular verve or zest by Catherine Zeta-Jones (it’s pretty stock stuff she’s asked to do, in her favor, however).
That all this doesn’t become cloying dreck has more to do with Spielberg’s sprightly tone than with Hanks’s performance (imagine Dustin Hoffman or Tom Cruise in the lead ‘wiz dat tick ock-sent und yew ken geese my mean-ink’). The best parts of Spielberg’s last picture, Catch Me If You Can, were the jaunty sequences in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s con man impersonated a jet pilot and strode through the airport. With The Terminal it’s as if Spielberg wanted to spend more time in the airport, too, and here, aided by the humongous set (in the Kubrick-Hitchcock tradition) and John Williams’s perky little score, he does just that (it also would have been great fun to have seen DiCaprio scurry by). The movie, more than anything else, is low-carb Spielberg—Spielberg-lite if you will—a fizzy summer diversion.
The Terminal is great for an audience craving an escape from all the CGI effects—which is an old whine—but it’s interesting to note that Spielberg, who almost single-handedly invented the summer blockbuster with Jaws, has stayed in the game because he hasn’t forgotten to start