The Terminal *** (2004, Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Chi McBride) – Classic Movie Review 483

Director Steven Spielberg’s 2004 airport drama is fascinating and of course impeccably made. It’s warm hearted and amusing but it’s also rather lethargic, artificial and slightly lacking enough spontaneous charm. Real life is re-invented as a popular movie vehicle for Tom Hanks, and happily he’s as appealing as always.

I know it’s only a movie but it’s also as phony seeming as Tom Hanks’s Eastern European accent as Viktor Navorski, a visitor to the US stranded at the JFK air terminal because his country’s had a revolution since he started his flight to the US. And he’s now stateless and must take up temporary residence at the terminal. In a sentimental plot, he’s trying to get to the Manhattan Ramada hotel, in Lexington Avenue, to get a jazz great playing there to sign his picture, to complete a set his late father started.

Sentimentally, Hanks’s Viktor Navorski meets lots of unusually really nice and helpful little people, all of different minorities and all of them poor, at the airport, who get him sent on his way eventually.

The film’s plot is inspired by the very different real-life story of Iranian refugee Merhan Nasseri, but totally fictionalised in this screen story by Andrew Niccol and Sacha Gervasi. In 1988, Nasseri landed at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport after being denied entry into England because his passport and United Nations refugee certificate had been stolen. The French authorities wouldn’t let him leave the airport so he remained in Terminal One as a stateless person with nowhere else to go. He left the terminal in August 2006 to be hospitalised for an unspecified illness.

You can’t help thinking that this real story would have made a better, more honest movie. And because it’s only a movie, they could dither about its ending, shooting and even screening two different ones.

In one of his typically detailed performances, Hanks does his darnedest to keep it engrossing but, at 122 minutes, it’s far too long and often uninvolving, in fact at times it’s terminally dull. Catherine Zeta Jones has very little to do as Hanks’s love interest, a married air stewardess whom Hanks falls for and she improbably reciprocates. She does it capably as usual though. But Stanley Tucci has a lot to do as the nasty airport controller who harasses Hanks, and, though Tucci’s okay, less would have been more.

The marvellously constructed, specially built vast airport set looks absolutely great, and it’s a huge credit to production designer Alex McDowell, though even it’s just a wee bit too pristine and fake looking, too. It’s a near-full-size terminal replica built in a former hangar, with three working sets of escalators and many familiar chain stores. It won an Excellence in Production Design award and there’s no doubt it deserves it.

It was selected as the opening film of the 2004 Venice Film Festival.

The girl with the suitcase that Viktor tries to help is Steven Spielberg’s daughter Sasha.

In January 2015 Hanks and Spielberg are working on a Cold War Thriller that is their fourth film project after Saving Private Ryan, The Terminal and Catch Me If You Can. The script, polished up by Joel and Ethan Coen, follows the true story of James Donovan, a CIA-backed lawyer who worked to negotiate the release of Francis Gary Powers, a U.S. pilot shot down over Soviet airspace in 1960 while piloting a U-2 spy plane.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 483

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