
The Terminal: Comedy-drama. Starring Tom Hanks, Stanley Tucci and
Catherine Zeta-Jones. Directed by Steven Spielberg. (PG-13. 130 minutes. At
Bay Area theaters.)
In “The Terminal,” Steven Spielberg has made an ineffably appealing and
rather sweet film about a guy who gets stuck in an airport. That’s not easy.
Say what you will about some flaws in the movie’s overall conception, or its
tendency to veer into schmaltz, which has always been Spielberg’s default
setting. But first take a minute to admire a filmmaker who can transform a
potentially static premise into a movie that’s one long succession of
interesting, detailed and amusing moments.
I’m not in love with “The Terminal,” but I liked every minute in it.
Other films are like empty containers; this one’s full. It’s full of invention,
full of moments, full of business, full of the nuances of human interaction,
full of feeling. Perhaps it takes a picture about confinement to fully
demonstrate how much Spielberg has always been about the journey, not the
destination. With mediocre filmmakers, the whole movie is contained in the
climax. With great filmmakers, the whole movie is happening every second.
Tom Hanks gets his best role in several years as Viktor, a visitor from a
small Eastern European nation who arrives at New York’s JFK airport only to
find out that his passport is invalid, following a sudden coup in his country.
He can’t go home, but without a valid passport he can’t enter the United
States, either. To make matters worse, he doesn’t understand English, so when
his plight is explained to him, he can only nod. He’s set loose in the
international airport to improvise a life for himself.
Descriptions of “The Terminal” have made it sound gimmicky. What needs to
be realized is that despite an undertone of whimsicality and the subtle comedy
of Hanks’ playing, Viktor’s situation carries significant emotional weight.
Certainly anyone who has ever been to a foreign country without knowing the
language can immediately sympathize with Viktor’s self-consciousness and near-
panic every time he has to ask anyone for anything. (Likewise, Viktor’s wild-
eyed freak-out at seeing his country in flames on CNN without being able to
understand the newscast brought me right back to my 2001 vacation, finding out
about Sept. 11 on Italian television.) It’s a feeling of complete dislocation
and vulnerability.
Yet gradually he gets the hang of it. Think of “The Terminal” as a less
somber, less unintentionally ridiculous and more visually stimulating version
of Robert Zemeckis’ “Cast Away,” with Hanks once again figuring out how to
eat, where to sleep and how to amuse himself in an inhospitable environment.
Along with Spielberg, screenwriters Jeff Nathanson, Sacha Gervasi and Andrew
Niccol somehow found a way to create a sense of forward motion, through what
easily could have seemed like a succession of disparate incidents. The
audience is even able to believe in and track the progress of Viktor’s English-
language immersion.
Viktor meets a lot of people. Most significantly, he meets a flight
attendant, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, who takes an interest in Viktor,
whom she assumes to be another frequent traveler. As played by Jones, who is
even more beautiful than usual here, the flight attendant is like the female
fantasy from countless 1970s films — a warm, neurotic, available, troubled
woman who, above all, is unaccountably attracted to the humble hero. The
romance is appealing, but it also exists on the movie’s fault line, the one
between truth and fable.
It’s a strange thing to realize: Spielberg never adequately accounts for
why Viktor must stay in that airport for months. Instead, he uses his
cinematic fairy dust to make us stop asking the question. As you may have read,
there’s a fellow in France who has lived in de Gaulle airport for 15 years.
In his case, he just refuses to leave. Spielberg eschews that possibility —
that would make Viktor a little nutty.
Instead he puts the blame on the authorities, represented in this case by
Stanley Tucci, as the frazzled head of airport security. But Spielberg won’t
go too far with that, either, because he wants to keep everybody within the
realm of cuddly.
It’s something of a problem that Spielberg is uninterested in an honest
examination of the very situation he presents. He’s not interested in why a
guy would live in an airport. Nor is he interested in why another guy would
force a guy to live in an airport.
You know what Spielberg is interested in? He’s interested in making “E.T.
” all over again, because E.T. is precisely what Viktor turns into — a wise,
kind, benevolent alien who eventually has to go home, but in the meantime is
all about sharing the love.
Some non-paid streaming video movie webservices , resources warn that cost-free watching movie services can only provide you bad quality movies with disappointing resolutions that destroy your online movie watching experience, it is Website host, i.e. does the site have plenty of bandwidth for uninterrupted viewing, or working links to the streaming movies you want to watch? These very important considerations that will have the greatest influence on the quality of your relaxation is what you will choose : download movie sites or streaming site. Download movie sites give a great resolution , so you can enjoy your favorite movies in hd quality anytime. Movies divx download
Well, so what? “E.T.” was a good picture, too.
Anyway, someone’s got to make Spielberg movies, and it might as well be
Spielberg.
– Advisory: Some mild ribald humor.