Holding pattern
Regular guy megastar Tom Hanks plays the role, ensuring his likeability, but any viewer who's ever endured jet lag or a delayed flight will empathize with Viktor's plight. Caught in a bureaucratic twilight zone, Viktor rises to the occasion like Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp or other fictitious Everymen.
The Terminal's comedic predicament takes off, fueled by such timely issues as homeland security, 21st-century consumerism and the promise of America. But while The Terminal's ideas go the distance, its subplots and supporting roles too often stay grounded.
At first, Viktor doesn't understand the gravity of his situation: He disguises his poor command of English by answering "Yes!" to every question. He sees war footage from his native Krakozhia on the terminal TV screens, but can't get a translation, nor can he navigate the American telephone system. A long, unsubtle tracking shot reveals that, though Viktor's surrounded by fellow travelers and the latest in modern technology, he's completely alone.
But he proves ingenious at making the most of an absurd situation. He turns a deserted, half-constructed corner of the airport into his home. Hard up for currency, he lives on "sandwiches" made from saltines and ketchup packets nabbed from the food court. As he earns the trust of the people around him, he plays Cupid for a food service worker (Y Tu Mamá Tambien's Diego Luna) who admires a beautiful U.S. Customs officer (Zoe Saldana).
Viktor finds the terminal to be a microcosm of modern America, filled with salt-of-the-earth blue-collar workers and generic corporate franchises like Starbucks and Borders (whose name puns the film's transcontinental context). Co-writer Andrew Niccol lightens up the high-tech paranoia of his earlier scripts, The Truman Show and Gattaca.
But frequently the characters feel contrived to keep the story going. By-the-book airport official Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci) becomes Viktor's oppressor and nemesis. At first he finds Viktor a potential embarrassment and only wishes to make him go away. Dixon gives him the chance to slip out of the airport, but Viktor refuses to enter America illegally. Dixon urges him to plead for asylum, but Viktor won't repudiate his homeland.
Dixon cultivates a petty grudge against Viktor and thwarts his attempt to earn quarters from travel-carts. It's easy to imagine Tucci as the kind of zealous security official who'd terrorize innocent travelers, but Dixon's vendetta lacks consistency, and he lets Viktor's subsequent, under-the-counter contracting work go unchallenged.
Viktor's halting romance with Amelia, Catherine Zeta-Jones' inconstant stewardess, proves even more artificial. The Terminal's love interest only seems present to attract the chick-flick audience, and Zeta-Jones does nothing to engage us with the sketchily drawn role.
Hanks can almost carry The Terminal single-handedly. His thick accent jars at first, but the actor brings out the humor in Viktor's verbal limitations without condescending to the role. When Amelia asks what time they should meet for dinner, Viktor replies, "Dinner time." More crucially, Hanks captures Viktor's bottomless tenacity. We accept how someone from a former Iron Curtain country could have reservoirs of patience and distrust for authority that Americans couldn't imagine. Viktor brings out the innate humanity in every encounter, and in the film's most gripping scene, he defuses a potentially violent confrontation over contraband Canadian prescription drugs.
Viktor's secret reason for wanting to visit New York turns out to be a quirky and touching kind of quest that nonetheless doesn't enrich the film's premise. Despite its frustrating flaws, The Terminal's wit and originality prevail. Going nowhere was never so fun.
curt.holman@creativeloafing.com
