For its first 20 minutes, Steven Spielberg's The Terminal manages to show all the blunders of bureaucracy. Unfortunately for the viewer, it quickly morphs into a saccharine-sweet fairy tale.
The film presents the implausible but acceptable plight of Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), a traveler from the fictitious Eastern European country Krakozhia, who is trying to get to New York. While in transit, a revolution topples the country's government, leaving Navorski in a state of limbo.
Navorski, who speaks and understands a small amount of English, is placed in the international lounge by airport security czar Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci). Dixon is an opportunistic, successful and morally ambiguous foil to Navorski's charming naivety. Dixon walks the thin line between villain (hiring a worker to remove Navorski's sole source of income) and problem-solver (looking for loopholes to rid Navorski of his problem), although, much like the blurriness of the film's aim, his true personality is not readily discernable.
The film is at its best when it shows the bloated bureaucracy of airport security. Navorski's plight shows how one person can get buried in red tape. A scene where Navorski, knowing all too well the various loopholes in the system, lies to allow a man to bring medicine to his dying father in Europe, illustrates how foolish many of the rules Dixon must uphold are.
These moments are few and far between, however, as the film degenerates into one ridiculous sideplot after another, highlighted by the eye-rolling marriage of a food worker and a security clerk. A romance/friendship between Navorski and a flight attendant named Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) becomes bogged down by coincidental meetings and forced dialogue. Navorski's mission in New York results in an ending that destroys the aesthetics of the film.
In Spielberg's films, the idea of divine intervention often seems to take center stage. Whether the Deux Ex Machina of an American aircraft swooping down in Saving Private Ryan or the near-death theatrics of the Indiana Jones series, the director gleefully takes liberties with reality.
It works in those films because of their larger-than-life importance, but for what could have been a far more serious story about the life of a bureaucracy, the magic is out of place.
While beautifully shot and well acted, this is what ultimately destroys the film. By playing it like a fairy tale, Spielberg missed the boat by allowing a creative concept to become less meaningful by sugary senselessness. Although not as monotonous as a two-hour delay, the hours that it takes to view the film is time you will never get back.
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Kyle Kondik
