Nicholas Thurkettle

Originally Published 7/5/04

The Terminal
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson, from a story by Andrew Niccol and Sacha Gervasi
Producers: Laurie MacDonald, Walter F. Parkes, Steven Spielberg
Stars: Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci, Chi McBride, Diego Luna, Barry Shabaka Henley, Kumar Pallana, Zoe Saldana

One of the dangers of The Terminal, Steven Spielberg’s slight but irresistibly sweet little trifle of a movie, is that you can want too badly for it to be Saying Something. It’s true that, in the story of innocent well-meaning Eastern European Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), who finds himself forced to live for months in the international terminal of a New York airport, words like “fable”, “allegory”, and “microcosm” do apply.

But to focus on that while watching the movie is to miss its many charms, which lie not in its symbols but in its very recognizable, very human quirks. One woman seated near me chuckled at the appearance of a Dept. of Homeland Security logo, like it was meant as some kind of sight gag about the relative intelligence of the security personnel. But that shortchanges the character of Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), who runs the security detail at the terminal.

In a lesser movie he would have just been the villain, a simple, scowly killjoy, well within Tucci’s range and willingness to ham things up. If you watch carefully, though, you’ll see that little aspects of his inner life are still revealing themselves up to his very last scene. This is not some incompetent autocrat, this is a man who finds comfort in a system of rules and is actually very good at his job, but finds himself alternately bamboozled, confounded, charmed and frustrated by Viktor Navorski’s refusal to behave like the cynical sneaks his system is designed to deal with.
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