"The Terminal"

Tom Hanks plays a sort of Esperanto Everyman stuck for months at JFK Airport in what is probably the worst-directed film Steven Spielberg has ever made.

By Charles Taylor

Jun 18, 2004 | Early in Steven Spielberg's "The Terminal" an immigration officer at JFK Airport in New York announces, "America is closed." How can an American movie with that line at this time provoke ... nothing? Not self-righteous applause, not hissing or booing. Nothing. The answer is when it's as blandly inoffensive as this picture.

"The Terminal," written by Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson from a story by Gervasi and Andrew Niccol (the writer of "The Truman Show"), recalls nothing so much as the artifacts of counterculture absurdist whimsy that were all over movie screens in the '60s and '70s. That perennial double-bill "King of Hearts" and "Harold and Maude" were two of the most popular. These were movies where the officials in charge were boobs and incompetents with a fetish for regulation and procedure. Their opposites were either rebellious free spirits or, more frequently, holy innocents who inadvertently roused the ire of the powerful. These movies offered the counterculture the fairy tale that their pure hearts would eventually defeat the forces of conformity and war and capitalism lined up against them. In other words, in the guise of making a political statement, they substituted kookiness and treacle for politics.

There is a difference between movies that avoid politics because they recognize that the divisions of politics -- or at least the way those divisions are employed -- usually end up diminishing art, and movies that soft-pedal the politics they raise for fear of alienating somebody. "The Terminal" belongs to the latter group. This story of a man (Tom Hanks) who gets stuck for months in the international lounge at JFK because of a bureaucratic Catch-22 must have struck Spielberg as a way to say that America's current suspicion toward foreigners is contrary to the American way without venturing into any of the messy questions the new restrictions on entering the country raise. (When Floyd Abrams, the country's most noted First Amendment lawyer, speaks in favor of racial profiling at airports, things are not breaking down along traditional left-right lines.)

Hanks plays Viktor Navorski. While he's en route to New York, the government of his Eastern European country is toppled in a coup. By the time he lands at JFK, his country is controlled by rebels not recognized by the U.S. government. Denied entry to America, he is unable to return home, and unable to go through the terminal doors and hail a cab for Manhattan. So Viktor becomes a resident of the international terminal, shuttling to the men's room in his bathrobe, returning luggage carts for spare change in order to eat, picking up bits of English from guide books he browses at the airport Borders or from looking at CNN, forming friendships with the airport workers he sees every day, and beginning a flirtatious dance with Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), the flight attendant he keeps running into.

Here's what you have to believe if that premise is going to work. In the international lounge of one of the world's busiest airports, Viktor wouldn't encounter any travelers who speak his language (unlikely, since the movie shows him making himself understood to a man from a neighboring country). You have to believe no one would hear Viktor's story and help him contact someone who could come to his aid. You'd have to believe that the press wouldn't get wind of Viktor's predicament sooner or later and turn it into an embarrassing piece of publicity for the U.S. government.

Next Page: Will liberals be gullible enough to swallow this film?

• View blog reactions