There are two great chroniclers of isolation among contemporary Hollywood filmmakers, Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, and it’s characteristic that in their latest works – both starring Tom Hanks – Spielberg locates that isolation right in the middle of a busy, crowded airport terminal, while Zemeckis (in Cast Away), picks out a lonely island.
Zemeckis has always seen isolation as a matter of social standing and status and has found physical borders to be effective delineators – even when those borders are at first as abstruse as time (the Back to the Future films). For Spielberg, though, isolation is a function of anxiety, initially, and sometimes, solely, individual. If that individual is lucky, he finds a group that can share and dissipate that anxiety, which is what happens in his latest film, The Terminal.
The Terminal also happens to be the latest of Spielberg’s movies to adopt a fairy tale plot. Underneath its sentimental account of a traveler from Eastern Europe who gets stranded in a U.S. airline terminal thanks to a coup and bureaucratic red tape, it’s the story of a knight errant whose divine quest is interrupted so that he may help a damsel in distress, a lowly squire to woo a beautiful maiden, and a mean troll become a helpful elf.
Hanks plays Victor Navorski, a traveler who lands at Kennedy Airport in New York on his way from his home in the fictional country of Krakozhia (which viewers could easily imagine as a former republic of the U.S.S.R.). Unfortunately, as he’s making his way through customs, the lawful Krakozhian government is overthrown by a military junta that the U.S. refuses to recognize, thus rendering Victor stateless and his passport void.
The head of the airport immigration service, Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), an exacting manager and bulldog of an agent, would like nothing more than for Victor to amble off the property and become the headache of another agency. But Victor resists all of Frank’s obvious winks to illegally bolt the terminal. Instead, he makes himself a home by abandoned Gate 66, learns English by studying guidebooks, and even gets a job on a remodeling crew that takes advantage of his carpentry skills.
Victor’s most important activities over the months he spends in suspension, though, involve the semi-permanent, transient citizenry of the terminal. There’s Amelia Warren (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a beautiful flight attendant having a not very rewarding affair with a married businessman; the extremely cranky and very funny janitor Gupta Rajan (Kumar Pallana), who likes to watch people slip and fall on his newly washed floors; and food service worker Enrique (Diego Luna), who has a silent crush on customs agent Torres (Zoë Saldana), who he fears is above his social station.
Victor helps them all, but his own goal is a secret held tightly within a can he keeps clutched tightly within the folds of his coat. Spielberg keeps the nature of the secret till very nearly the end of the movie, thus so will I. Suffice to say that The Terminal is the second Spielberg feature in a row to examine the idea of filial duty.
The Terminal is notable on a few other fronts. For one thing, it gives Spielberg an opportunity to display a sophisticated sense of physical comedy. This isn’t merely the ability to show people slipping and sliding across one of Gupta’s traps (though there’s certainly that), but accomplishing the almost Lubitschian touch of a man performing spinning plate tricks during a romantic dinner.
Spielberg also employs a more variegated shooting style than he has in most recent films. Daytime in the terminal looks glossy and evenly-lit, but Spielberg manages to use the multiplicity of lights for some deep focus effects. When Victor curls up one night to read, there’s a remarkably warm use of light, while the finale is Technicolor fantasia.
Finally, there is the movie’s wonderful emotional flow, from Victor outwards towards the workers who befriend him, and ultimately even to the minions of the horrible and evil wizard, Mr. Dixon (who like all evil and horrible wizards, remains evil and horrible to the last). Among other devices, Spielberg uses, of all things, TV sets to mark the affect Victor has had on all the people around him, a tactic that is quite effective despite seeming so banal.
The Terminal is the sort of film sometimes written off as “little” or as a “bauble” when it first appears. But the history of Hollywood is essentially the history of little films.