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 1 of 5

The Terminal Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (for brief language and drug references) Theater release: June 18, 2004 by DreamWorks Directed by: Steven Spielberg Runtime: 2 hours 8 minutes Cast: Tom Hanks (Viktor Navorski), Catherine Zeta-Jones (Amelia), Stanley Tucci (Frank Dixon), Chi McBride (Joe Mulroy), Diego Luna (Enrique Cruz), Kumar Pallana (Gupta) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Near the end of Steven Spielberg's new film The Terminal—an ambitious, whimsical and sentimental movie similar in tone and gloss to 2001's Catch Me If You Can—one of the characters proves to be quite a juggler. It's a delightful moment, primarily because we know we aren't watching a special effect. That guy's really juggling those hoops and spinning those plates! Likewise, Spielberg's film is a juggling act that keeps the audience enthralled with small wonders and dramatic crescendos, even though he drops several of the hoops he's tossed, and some of the ideas spin out of control and crash to the floor in a cacophony of Hollywood clichés.

The film plays out in a New York airport, which becomes the most exciting movie set Spielberg's ever served up—a masterfully realized terminal constructed by production designer Alex McDowell. It's a wonderland custom-made for master cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, providing him with a spectacular array of textures, details, and kaleidoscopic light. Packed with convincing crowds of extras, it's a bustling microcosm of American life: capitalism, consumer anxiety, assaults of advertising, information overload, pagers, fast food, post-9/11 tension, and Frappucinos. Kiminski's cameras acrobatically avoid the stampeding tourists, travelers, employees, security officials, and immigrants that clamber over each other in pursuit of tickets, souvenirs, information, sex, alcohol, a job … the works.

Tom Hanks is brilliant as Nivorski, stranded at the airport

Spielberg drops Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) into the middle of this aquarium, a foreigner coming to New York on a secret mission—and then imprisons him there. In a scene of panic-inducing revelation, Navorski learns from the airport televisions that his (fictional) home country of Krakozhia has just descended into chaos, its government overthrown by a military coup. Since the U.S. can't take any planes to this overturned nation, and since Krakozhian travelers are now people without a country, Navorski cannot be allowed to touch American soil. (The film is inspired by the true story of Merhan Nasseri, an Iranian refugee.) Navorski knows little English and has no American friends to come to his aid. He is stranded, stumbling around under the watchful eye of Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), the airport's head Homeland Security officer. It reminds us of poor Truman Burbank's life being monitored from a god's-eye view in The Truman Show, and it should—The Terminal grew from a story by The Truman Show's Andrew Niccol.

Spielberg's choice of Hanks was a no-brainer. Navorski is an amalgam of Hanks' previous characters. Like a 12-year-old trapped in the body of a grownup (Big), Navorski's trying to learn the manner, language, and codes of American society while maintaining some semblance of dignity and confidence. He's striving to make sense of this insulated world just as Forrest Gump did his best to make sense of the great wide open. Like a man marooned on a desert island (Cast Away), he's stranded and fighting for survival without the necessary resources at hand, alone in a wilderness, albeit a crowded one. (He keeps a sealed Planter's peanuts can close at hand which contains a mysterious secret, not unlike that sealed FedEx box.) He's even got that humble and virtuous look of the wrongfully mistreated that Hanks wore in Philadelphia.

Hanks, looking for a place to rest in the terminal

Taking on one staggeringly difficult role after another has turned Hanks into a sort of Hollywood stuntman. This has, unfortunately, worked against him. Viewers tend to walk away from his movies talking about the amazing feats of the actor instead of thinking about the character and the story. When I interviewed Michael Caine once, Caine insisted that if the audience is thinking about the actor, then the actor has failed. If the actor disappears into the character, and we forget about the performer, then he has succeeded. For the first few minutes of The Terminal, it's hard not to be distracted by Hanks' latest transformation. But thankfully, Spielberg and his screenwriters, Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson, give Navorski so much to do that we quickly get past thinking about that flawless Russian accent. They make him a three-dimensional human being. It's Hanks' finest performance yet.

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