Tom Hanks is perhaps the most daring actor of his generation: He thought people would watch a movie about a man stranded on an island. He was right. “Cast Away” grossed more than $230 million. That’s incredible, especially seeing how his co-star was a volleyball.
Hanks might have figured “The Terminal”—about a man stranded in JFK’s international transit terminal—would be less of a gamble. After all, he wouldn’t have to carry the film solo, and he would re-team with his “Catch Me If You Can” director, Steven Spielberg.
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Opening June 18, “The Terminal” has made just over $65 million. It seems to be circulating on the baggage conveyor belt of summer releases without a “2” in the title.
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Despite box office numbers, which are surely disappointing for a Spielberg-Hanks outing, the film-making duo had good instincts about the story. “The Terminal” is time well spent inside an airport.
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Hanks plays Viktor Navorski, a man from a fictional country in Eastern Europe, who is detained indefinitely at New York’s JFK airport. Viktor’s homeland has undergone a coup while he was in the air, and he is a man without a country—and hence without the necessary credentials for passing into the United States.
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It’s a fun premise, and one that is enforced by Frank Dixon, the airport’s security chief played sometimes unevenly by Stanley Tucci. Viktor inadvertently makes Frank’s job a nightmare, but Frank refuses to let the foreigner pass for narratively necessary but sketchy reasons.
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Ultimately, though, “The Terminal” isn’t about having an airtight premise. It’s about the America that Viktor experiences in the terminal.
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Viktor forges relationships with airport workers, many of them recent immigrants themselves. How they instigate, maintain and defend those bonds makes for a revealing and touching exploration of the fabric of this country.
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Viktor must wait … and wait … and wait, and how he fills the time is both comic and indicative of the ingenuity this country has demanded of the people who arrive at its shores.
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His exploits in and around Gate 67 of the terminal are too many to name—but they coalesce into a meaningful movie-going experience, even if one a little longer than necessary.
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The B-storyline has Catherine Zeta-Jones playing a flight attendant whose path repeatedly crosses Viktor’s. This could have and should have been excised; Zeta-Jones is fine, but she’s so less interesting than Viktor’s other comrades.
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Why Viktor wants to gain entry to New York is a bit of a mystery—as is the peanut tin he carries around. But everyone has a reason for coming to America, and “The Terminal” is anything but the end of his journey.
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Cliff Vaughn is culture editor for EthicsDaily.com.
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief language and drug references.
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson
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Cast: Viktor Navorski: Tom Hanks; Amelia Warren: Catherine Zeta-Jones; Frank Dixon: Stanley Tucci; Joe: Chi McBride; Enrique: Diego Luna; Ray: Barry Shabaka Henley; Gupta: Kumar Pallana; Officer Torres: Zoe Saldana.
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The movie’s official Web site is here.