A film review by Craig J. Koban |
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THE TERMINAL
2004, PG-13, 121 mins. Viktor Navorski: Tom Hanks / Amelia: Catherine Zeta-Jones / Frank Dixon: Stanley Tucci / Ray Thurman: Barry Shabaka Henley / Mulroy: Chi McBride / Enrique Cruz: Diego Luna / Gupta Rajan: Kumar Pallanatucci / INS agent: Zoe Saldana Directed by Steven Spielberg / Written by Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson |
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Okay, okay…while watching THE TERMINAL I fully realized that Steven Spielberg was trying to make a nostalgic throwback, fish-out-of-water fable that had echoes of Frank Capra. Maybe that’s precisely the problem with the film. Its incessant yearning to reach out and appropriate those Capra moments seems as needless as it does tiresome, and the film is bathed in excessively sentimental and melodramatic waters. THE TERMINAL is a film that constantly peals away layer after layer of inconsistencies and inane ideas until it inevitably reaches its core of complete and utter implausibility. The film is ever-so-loosely based on a true story and I only point that out to reveal that, if it were not mentioned by me, then everyone would consider this misfire more fantasy than reality.
In
Spielberg’s unusually misguided hands THE TERMINAL is a disappointment.
In our post-9/11 geo-political climate that includes intense security and
overall paranoia for all things even latently and indirectly dangerous, THE
TERMINAL’s overt happiness and cozy warmth feels contrived and phony at best.
This is apparent alongside moments of lame and spotty melodrama that made
my stomach churn. Hockey metaphors aside, If SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, SCHINDLER’S LIST, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
OF THE THIRD KIND, and
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
were hat tricks, then THE
TERMINAL is not even a reasonable shot on net.
From a man who is arguably the best populist filmmaker of
his generation, THE TERMINAL is a letdown and a blackmark on Spielberg’s
respectable and fairly untarnished resume.
If there is one thing that I
am relieved at it then it's Spielberg’s insistence to not have a “based on a true
story” credit on the screen. THE
TERMINAL may be somewhat based on the real life Iranian refuge Merhan Nasseri
who, in 1988, landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris.
He was subsequently denied entry into England as a result of his passport
and United Nations refugee certificate being unfortunately stolen.
As a result, the French authorities would not let him leave the airport
under any circumstances. Nasseri
became a stateless man with no place to go.
Apparently, he was later granted permission to either leave the airport
and enter France or go back to his home country, but instead chose to stay and
reside in the terminal. Funny, but I don't think he ever, while
there, got a $19 per hour construction job, met and feel in love with a
beautiful stewardess, and helped set up a deliveryman and an airport agent to
become husband and wife.
Nasseri's story could have
made for a fascinating docudrama, but I think Spielberg missed a real
obvious opportunity to make a scathing and incriminating human drama about
persecution with the right undertones of comic madness and insanity.
In his hands, he has appropriated the basic elements and makes a squeaky
clean comedy that felt more like a two hour sitcom than a real exploration into
this man’s terrible predicament. Instead
of social commentary, we get lots of slapstick antics, one dimensional
characters, ridiculous plot developments, and absurd comedy that seems more
appropriate in films that have the name Adam Sandler headlining it. Mr. Spielberg, you are too good of a filmmaker and are
above this type of mediocrity.
Spielberg has always been a director
of big ideas, images, and themes. THE
TERMINAL is a step down from his usual large scale productions, to a degree, and
that’s noble enough. Yet, it is
his yearning and obsessive earnestness to be relentless and heinously upbeat
that destroys the film. He treads
very shaky, dangerous ground in painfully forced moments to be Capra-esque, and
that proves to be the film’s ultimate undoing.
The smaller moments, which are few and far between, are nice and well
handled, but the larger scenes are too broad and unforgivably manipulative.
THE TERMINAL, thus, is more fantasy than reality, and a story that never
once had me believing in it.
Tom Hanks (in a serviceable, but
strongly one note performance) plays Victor Navorski, a native of the obviously
fictitious Slavic country of Krakozia. While
he is traveling from his beloved home country to America’s JFK airport, his
homeland becomes engulfed in a bloody civil war in which a military coup takes
place within the nation’s government. When
Victor arrives in the United States, barely able to speak English (he speaks his
native tongue mostly, which is, in reality, Bulgarian, but never mind) and soon
discovers that his Visa has been cancelled. The US has not recognized the new government of Krakozhia,
which truly adds weight to Victor’s shoulders.
He subsequently cannot even be deported. In short and simple political terms, he does not exist.
He finds all of this out
in a scene that was equal parts frustrating as it was unbelievable.
The head of the airport Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci) briefs him on all of
this, despite the fact that Victor can barely speak two words of English.
Why Frank even tries to explain these things without an interpreter or
how Victor manages to comprehend most of his predicament is amazing to me.
Nevertheless, Frank decides to grant
Victor free reign of the International Terminal, provided that he never leaves
the airport nor steps foot on US soil. He
does provide him lunch vouchers and a measly fifteen minute calling card. Victor soon accepts his status and again, amazingly, begins
to establish a habitual routine and a life at the terminal.
He manages to find a place to sleep every night (which is never really
discovered or dealt with) begins to find ways to make money to support himself
(in one hilariously overwrought point in the film, he manages to get
construction work in the terminal that pays $19 an hour, which affords him
the chance to buy nice expensive suits) and gradually gets to know the other
workers of the airport. It's funny, but Spielberg seems more interested in playing up light to broad comedy and spicing up every scene with false notes of sentimentality than truly investing in what would be a fascinating and intrinsically interesting premise. Following the day-to-day activities of this man would be a constant source of enlightenment, but more groans emerge that elation by watching it. He meets the obligatory colourful and all strangely different personalities. One man he meets is an East Indian janitor with a terrible secret and later gets introduced to a food service delivery man that provides Victor with food if he can help set him up with a gorgeous INS agent (how the delivery man never gets into trouble for giving away free food and how inventory levels are never checked or scrutinized is never dealt with).
Victor also meets a pair of baggage handlers who play poker with him after work
hours not for money, but for items from the lost and found.
As stated, Victor barely speaks English, but teaches himself by endlessly
studying volumes of English texts from the airport bookstore and by watching TV.
Oh, and since he becomes a carpenter and construction worker making big
bucks, he is able to, without any intervention or questioning, rip down
walls, gut its innards, and create fantastic facades, without any clear
permission from anyone. This is
embellished in one the film’s dumbest scenes where a construction laborer
states, “I want him on my payroll from now on.” This is a close second to a moment when Victor reveals a
beautifully realized marble water fountain that he made, again unabated, for the
woman he loves.
The woman he meets and falls in love
with is Amelia, played by Catherine Zeta Jones.
She is a knockout stewardess whom he bumps into frequently. She is a closet intellectual (she reads thousand page books
on Napoleon) but is too stupid and narrow-minded to understand that Victor is a
refuge (when Victor tells her he goes from “building to building”, she
responds, “Oh, you’re a contractor!”).
They see each other a lot, but Jones does not come across as the cleanest
of women (she is having an affair with a married man, which instantly
nullifies any sympathy we have for her, as well as diminishing our desire that
Victor hooks up with this loser). Amelia,
nevertheless, feels like she can open her heart to this man.
Sure. Right.
Uh-huh. In yet another one
of the movie’s inexplicable scenes, Victor takes her out for a date at the
terminal with his various terminal friends posing at waiters, servers, and
magicians. I was less taken in with
the emotions of the moment and was kept too busy by regurgitating in mind,
“what-EVER!”
On a positive note, THE TERMINAL is
a masterpiece of set design and spatial inventiveness.
I was amazed later to discover that Spielberg did not shoot in a
real airport but rather had the whole set constructed in a warehouse. It’s a gloriously realized set, but the sight of all of
those endless product shots and endorsements of fast food companies, book
merchants, and retail outlets were kind of off-putting. In a film that’s
supposed to down to earth and sweet, its overt and heavy-handed focus on
commercialism and product placement was a sore spot (why not use fictional
places, that would have drawn less attraction to itself).
Spielberg’s directorial eye is also apparent, although not as much as
it needs to be. Many times you
can’t once sense his presence as a director, but for a few quiet moments, his
play with light and shadow bares his signature well. The film is completely negligible on a story, character, and believability level. Hanks is adequate as Victor, but it’s by no means a stretch for the actor, and the two time Oscar winner seems to phone this one in. The supporting characters are fun and quirky, but their individual sub-plots are rushed and poorly realized, if at all. The courtship of the deliveryman and the INS agent defies reality in large ways, as does their shotgun wedding that takes place at the terminal. Probably the most inspired character in the film is Gupta, the Indian janitor (played very humorously by Kumar Pallanatucci). He kind of shines in small moments, especially when he reveals a painful secret to Victor.
Yet, he is also the source of the single most manipulative and
outrageously unbelievable moment in the film (it involves him running to a
moving airplane with a broom in hand and ends with a moment that rivals the
final court hearing scene in PATCH ADAMS for its unforgivable cornball theatrics).
Amelia herself remains one of the most mindless and redundant
characters in the film, whose presence is as unnecessary as it was superfluous.
There is so much build up with her and Victor that does not pay off on
any meaningful way at all. This, in
turn, reveals how unnecessary of a character she was, and if Spielberg excised
her from the script, he would have had a much tighter story. The film is long as it is, and the final moments between her
and Victor are a dramatic letdown (this is one of two versions that Spielberg
shot, maybe he should have used the other?)
The biggest problem with THE
TERMINAL is Spielberg’s decision to take a character that started off well and
degenerate him into more of a one-dimensional antagonist.
The head of the airport – Frank – begins as a fairly respectable and
solid airline official that plays by the book.
Yet, as the film progresses and his hatred of Victor’s situation grows,
he develops into a unsavory, power-hungry villain whose only purpose in life is
to make Victor’s life as uncomfortable as possible.
He’s so broadly played by Tucci and so inappropriately handled that he
eventually came across more of a despicable college dean in a bad frat house
movie than a realistic airport bureaucrat.
He becomes so hateful and vindictive that you constantly ask yourself why
he does not just arrest Victor in some sort of convenient set-up?
Spielberg is capable of making fresh, colorful, and whimsical light-hearted films (his CATCH ME IF YOU CAN was one of the best films of 2002). Yet here he panders and becomes a slave to the heavy-handed melodrama and creates individual scenes and characters that (a) have tremendous build-up and (b) whose conclusions from that build up lack satisfying closure or stretch the suspension of disbelief to the extreme. It seems forced, contrived, and rings untrue at almost every pore. It's pleasant-minded and harmless, but has no idea really where it wants to go or what tone it wishes to encapsulate. However, it is Spielberg’s own fault for brushing over the film with an uncomfortable swipe of unapologetic sappiness and crude slapstick. I have watched most of his work and have been moved in some capacities, but watching THE TERMINAL made me feel emotional vacant, and its desire to be a Capra-esque feel-good film is completely undermined by its ill-conceived subplots, badly realized characters, and a basic premise that is difficult to believe in. For the first time in my young movie viewing life (and considering how much admiration I have had for his work over the years), I am ashamed to admit that I could not wait to depart from this Spielberg film. |
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