In a sentenceThe better part of a year in an airport, and the shops come out of it better than the love story
Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) lands at JFK from Krakozhia and learns that while he was in the air there was a coup at home. His passport belongs to a government the United States no longer recognises, so he cannot enter New York or fly back. Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), the official who runs the terminal, tells him to wait in the international lounge and waits for him to become somebody else’s problem. Viktor stays. He sleeps at Gate 67, closed for building work, collects abandoned trolleys for the refunded quarters, and learns English from a guidebook. Enrique Cruz (Diego Luna) feeds him in exchange for news of the immigration officer Torres (Zoe Saldaña), and a flight attendant, Amelia Warren (Catherine Zeta-Jones), keeps mistaking him for a passenger.
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Steven Spielberg builds a whole airport and puts Tom Hanks in it, and for an hour the film is light on its feet and more touching than we expected. Then it reaches for a romance it cannot land and a sweetness it cannot stop.
Steven Spielberg has built an airport and locked Tom Hanks inside it. Viktor Navorski lands at JFK from Krakozhia, a country that stops existing while he is over the Atlantic, and Frank Dixon, who runs the terminal, leaves him in the international lounge until he goes away. He does not go away. The Terminal is a small, warm comedy about a man who makes a home in a place designed for passing through, and for its first hour it is better than we had any right to expect. The second hour spends much of that goodwill.
The building is the star, and Alex McDowell has built it whole: escalators, departure boards, a food court, shops with real names on the front. Janusz Kamiński lights it as if the whole place had a skylight, pale and even, with Viktor small in the wide frame and always visible. Hanks plays him with a shuffle, a beard, a heavy coat he will not take off and an accent that is thick, cheerful and never mocked. He works out that returned trolleys pay a quarter each, sleeps behind the builders’ plastic at Gate 67, and learns English from a guidebook in two languages.
The scene that got at us comes early. Viktor stands at a shop window watching the news from Krakozhia on a bank of televisions, tanks and a burning flag and a reporter he cannot understand, with the sound off. Everyone else in the frame walks past. Hanks does almost nothing with his face and it is the best acting in the film; our throats tightened, and we were slightly annoyed with ourselves, because we knew which lever had been pulled. John Williams pulls it too, with a clarinet theme for Viktor that is warm and a little too keen to help.
Stanley Tucci is the other reason to watch. Dixon is up for promotion and wants a problem filed, and Tucci plays him tight and tidy, growing pettier as the problem declines to be filed. The script by Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson, from a story by Andrew Niccol and Gervasi, gives him one good speech about a man who is nobody’s responsibility and then makes him small and spiteful so the ending has someone to beat. Chi McBride’s Mulroy, Diego Luna’s Enrique and Kumar Pallana’s Gupta make a decent terminal family. Enrique’s courtship of the immigration officer Torres (Zoe Saldaña), conducted through Viktor as go-between, has more romance in it than the romance.
Catherine Zeta-Jones has been handed a flight attendant who reads history between flights and carries a pager for a married man. Amelia exists so that Viktor can be kind to her, and every scene between them slows the film to a walk, with Williams laying strings under dialogue that cannot carry them. We felt it go cold and found ourselves reading the departure boards over her shoulder. Christine Wada and Mary Zophres keep Viktor in the same brown coat for months, so that the day he changes it lands harder than the script around it.
Michael Kahn cuts the first hour as a run of small problems solved, a sandwich, a bed, a bath in the gents, and the rhythm is close to silent comedy. The second hour has four subplots to settle and he settles them one after another, each with its own swell, so the film seems to end several times.
Spielberg had made Catch Me If You Can (2002) two years earlier, another Hanks film about a man living by his wits, and that one kept its nerve to the end. Here he has built an airport and cannot bear for it to be unkind for long. The harder story, a man with no country and no rights inside a building made of rules, is visible in every frame, and the film keeps looking away from it.
See it for Hanks, Tucci and the building. Watch it at home, where the last twenty minutes can be taken as a well-meant hug rather than a demand. It carries a 12A and there is nothing in it a child could not watch, which is also the problem.
Most critics find The Terminal a charming, lightweight fable that leans hard on sentiment and largely gets away with it. The praise clusters around Tom Hanks: the reviews call his performance subtle, inventive and touching, and several think he carries the film. Spielberg’s fluent handling and the airport set, realised down to its ordinary, bustling detail, draw approval too, and more than one critic describes the film as buoyant or feelgood without apology.
The reservations gather around sweetness and slightness. Several critics find the film overlong, its central conflict thin, its romance the least convincing element and its emotional payoff falling short. Slant Magazine calls it inconsistent, with perceptive moments undercut by crude slapstick, and Radio Times faults Spielberg for avoiding the story’s harsher realities. The spread is wide: verdicts run from warm to outright rejection, with The Guardian dismissing it as irritating, over-sweet and empty, and objecting to its brand-name product placement.
Foundas finds the film a buoyant, spirit-lifting fable, though its conflict is slight and a late subplot feels out of place. He praises Tom Hanks’s understated comic performance and the film’s optimistic outlook.
Read the full review →Nathan finds the film an elegant, caustic fable whose humor and sentiment are more distinctive than its romance. He especially praises Tom Hanks’s subtle performance and the film’s graceful visual craft.
Read the full review →Goodridge presents the film as an unabashedly sentimental feelgood heartwarmer. He praises Spielberg’s fluent craft and ability to move viewers.
Read the full review →Turan finds the film a charming, consistently amusing diversion, though its attempts at emotional and romantic payoff fall short. He especially praises Tom Hanks’s inventive, energetic comic performance.
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Playtime · not on Fi1m yetTati builds a whole city of glass and lets it be strange and unkind.
Catch Me If You CanSpielberg and Hanks two years earlier, with a spine the airport film lacks.
The Visitor · not on Fi1m yetThe same subject, a man the paperwork will not allow, taken seriously.
Up in the AirAirports as a way of life, and a man who prefers it that way.
AmélieAnother kind stranger fixing other people’s lives; sweeter, and knows it.
