Terminals of Endearment: A Review of The Terminal

After too great a length of time I have finally posted my review of the new Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks film, The Terminal. Let me first state that this is a good but not great film. I do not think that this film is better or worse on or off the big screen. Therefore, if you do not wish to spend $20 or more dollars, I would suggest waiting a few months till it is released on video.

The hero is named Viktor Navorski. He has arrived in a vast American airport just as his nation, Krakozia, (which sounds a bit like Crack-hoes, ala SNL’s Norm MacDonald) has fallen in a coup. Therefore his passport and visa are worthless, his country no longer exists, and he cannot go forward or go back. Dixon the customs official (Stanley Tucci) tells him he is free to remain in the International Arrivals Lounge, but forbidden to step foot on American soil.

This premise of this film is naturally absurd but ultimately unimportant for the films purpose. Most film premises are absurd; what matters to the audience ultimately is whether or not we can suspend our disbelief for the duration of the film in order to enjoy it for itself.

Roger Ebert has noted that there exists in The Terminal a humor that reminds one of sequences in Chaplin or Keaton where comedy and sadness find a fragile balance. It is true that the film undertakes to express a profound simplicity in its humor that is reminiscent of some of the better films of Chaplin and Keaton. Looking back over the career of Tom Hanks, with such films as Big and Forrest Gump on his belt, it is obvious that Hanks has a special talent for playing good and simple characters who survive in a hurried, pessimistic world that is distrustful of others and suspicious of honest human decency.

Navorski is a man who is exactly who he seems to be and claims to be. He has no guile, no hidden motives, no suspicion of others. He trusts. The immigration service, and indeed the American legal system, has no way of dealing with him because Viktor does not do any of the things the system is set up to prevent him from doing, or not doing.

In the epistle to the Romans, chapter 13, Paul writes about Christians being subject to governmental authority. Most people, including myself, have always interpreted this passage as arguing that governments are used by God to hold back evil. And that’s true. But most people, and I am mostly thinking of myself, have always assumed that the evil being held back is that of bad people. Governments and their laws are in place to protect good people from bad people. Recently, I have been listening to sermons given by Reinhold Neibuhr. In one sermon, he states that governments and their laws are in place to keep good people from doing evil. This is a very interesting idea. The logic is there: a bad person is going to ignore the laws; that’s why he is bad; a good person is not going to ignore the laws; that’s why he is good.

In the case of Viktor Navorski, he has slipped through a perfect logical loophole in a system anticipating the bad but confronted with the good. Naturally, he raises the ire of the system. The Terminal is like a sunny Kakfa story, in which it is the citizen who persecutes the bureaucracy.

The terminal is filled with characters Navorski gets to know, such as Amelia the flight attendant (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who is having an affair with a married man and finds she can open her heart to this strange, simple man. And Gupta the janitor (Kumar Pallanatucci), who leaves the floor wet and watches as passengers ignore the little yellow warning pyramids and slip and fall. "This is the only fun I have," he says. And a food services employ (Diego Luna), who is in love with an INS official (Zoe Saldana) and uses Navorski as his go-between.

These friends and others have secret social lives in the terminal, feasting on airline food, playing poker. Navorski becomes their hero when he intervenes in a heart-rending case. A Russian man has medicine he needs to take to his dying father, but government regulations say it must stay in the United States. The man goes berserk, a hostage situation threatens, but Navorski defuses the situation and finds a solution using a loophole in the bureaucratic code.

If someone had not told me that this was a Spielberg film I would not have guessed it. For all the best reasons, The Terminal is a slow paced and warm film that cleverly hides its technical expertise. There were several clever shots that would go unnoticed by the casual viewer. There are two shots in particular, both involving reflective surfaces, which speak to Spielberg’s technical and visual creativity. In most Spielberg films, both the technical and visual are apparent to all and everything is a flashy fireworks display of sights and sounds. Here Spielberg has told his story in a small corner of his oeuvre with a style that focuses our attention on the story and its performance and not on the expertise.

Yet, and this is something that utterly surprised me, three times during the film, I spotted the boom mike dangling down into the shot. Each of these moments occurred at three separate intervals during the course of the film; they were not all in the same scene. Now, I am neither an authority on movie making nor an expertise in the art of the auteur theory of film. In terms of the creative arts, I can appreciate most forms of craft, including film, painting, sculpture, and music, but, primarily, I focus my creativity on the literature and the written word. Having that said, I, a film dilettante, noticed the boom mike thrice; should not the great Steven Spielberg have noticed this error, this film typo? If he had noticed the mistake he would have been able to digitally erase it. Why didn’t he notice? Or, if he did notice, why didn’t he care to fix the error. It may have been that Spielberg either lost interest in this film or never had much interest in this film in the first place. That is a possibility. Time will tell.

The main problem with the film, though, is not the typos but the message. The apparent theme of the film seems to involve the idea of waiting. Navorski lingers day after day in the arrivals lounge, waiting, simply waiting for his situation to change. The INS and customs officials wait for Navorski to do something that brings him out of bureaucratic limbo. Ameila is waiting for the right man and a better lot in life. All the characters are waiting. One might be tempted to see in this film a strand of Beckett’s existential masterpiece, Waiting for Godot. But I looked and found nothing. This film could have been about a man trapped in a terminal, which represents life, and the man is stranded in life, trying to survive and going through all the stages. Developing language (at the beginning of the movie Navorski doesn’t speak but a few out-of-place English phrases), developing an income in order to eat (he starts by returning luggage carts for the change and then becomes a highly paid construction worker at the airport), and developing relationships (Amelia and the other airport terminal workers). This could have been a great film, all the parts are there, but the film never seems to turn that corner into an existential piece, like that of The Truman Show. The script itself cannot seem to decide whether it is a light-hearted comedy or an allegorical tale. It could have been both but it never seems willing to make that decision. My guess is that the scriptwriters saw it as both but Spielberg saw it as only light-hearted comedy he wanted. Because of this confusion, the message of the film never becomes clear and we never learn the significance of “waiting” or what “waiting” is supposed to be. For this reason only, I say this is a good but not great film. Perhaps if I did not see the lapse in the film’s potential I would give it a higher grade.

[For another opinion on the allegorical content of the film, see here.]