"The Terminal"

Here's how "The Terminal" wants you to believe it: the perfidy of the U.S. government. In the movie's scheme, Dixon, the head of airport security (Stanley Tucci) is in line for a promotion and fears calling attention to any problem that might jeopardize it. A single moment of rationality should have told Spielberg and his screenwriters that Viktor is much more of a threat to Dixon's promotion while he's wandering around loose. If he's the security risk Dixon sometimes suspects he is (Dixon is obsessed with finding out what's in the can of Planter's nuts Viktor guards with his life -- it's a lot less interesting that Dixon imagines), then Dixon can only hurt his career by not interrogating him. If Viktor is just a poor sap stuck in a bureaucratic no man's land, Dixon's failure to provide him with a translator or food or traveler's aid means the story could easily get out for someone else to spin. From there Dixon could kiss his promotion goodbye.

But if the American government's hostility toward foreigners is an article of faith for you, then it doesn't matter how implausible "The Terminal" is. And the recent deluge of depressing news -- not just the horrors at Abu Ghraib but the stories of people picked up and held on the flimsiest of suspicions -- are, for some, going to make the movie a "relevant" experience. As a liberal, I'd like to believe that liberals aren't going to be gullible enough to swallow a movie so blatantly tailored to their prejudices. But I've seen worse movies than "The Terminal" acclaimed for their courage and daring.

Stanley Tucci's performance is designed to flatter those prejudices. He's playing an ambitious, rigid, tightly held-in man, a man who can't think of any other way to do things than by the book. But he doesn't show us the fear that might have humanized this putz. Throughout the movie, walking around the airport or even just sitting at his desk, Tucci leads with his balding head. Are we to intuit from the emphasis Tucci puts on his gleaming pate that he's playing a walking hard-on? The situations devised to show what a meanie Dixon is are shameless: He denies a man medicine to take back to his dying father; he threatens to deport foreign airport workers. Tucci doesn't have the sense of restraint to underplay these situations (or, rather, his underplaying is a form of overplaying). If Spielberg had given Tucci a chance to kick a dog to show what a bastard Dixon is, he'd have seized it.

In Spielberg's view, Dixon represents the un-American American, and the people who come to befriend Viktor -- the airport workers -- are the melting pot that prove him wrong. Spielberg doesn't find a way to make that melting pot funny, the way Paul Mazursky did in "Moscow on the Hudson." Worse, you can't make a movie about the way foreign people are made invisible in America when you're using the foreign actors in your movie as little more than ads for brotherhood, the way they were used in that old Coke commercial. (Next to the way Alfonso Cuarón unshowily includes so many nonwhite faces in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," Spielberg's method is embarrassingly obvious.)

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