'The Terminal' unabashedly hopeful about people and their dreams

By Chris Hewitt
Knight Ridder Newspapers

THE TERMINAL Directed by: Steven Spielberg Starring: Tom Hanks, Stanley Tucci, Catherine Zeta-Jones Rated: PG-13 for brief, strong language Should you go? It's a gentle, leisurely fable that relies on character instead of visual flash to keep us interested.

Hopeful but not sappy. Steven Spielberg has clamped a lid on the impulse to tidy the life out of his stories, an impulse that marred movies such as "The Color Purple," and he gives "The Terminal" a buoyant sense of possibility.

There are the possibilities that Viktor Navorski longs for as he makes friends in an airport terminal, where he's stranded for months as he waits for a passport snafu to be unboondoggled. There are the possibilites for those friends, each of whom Viktor helps realize that they're living their lives in a holding pattern. And there are the possibilities in this low-key movie, which seems alive to the possibility that every corner of its vast airport set harbors a story worth telling.

"Terminal" is best when it focuses on Viktor, whom Tom Hanks turns into a unique movie character. For much of the film, Viktor is an enigma — we don't why he's trying to get to America, what his life is like in his fictional European homeland or why he sticks to his trusty Planter's nut can like rice on roni.

There's a bit of Charlie Chaplin's the Tramp in Viktor, particularly in the early scenes, before he learns to speak English, and a bit of Peter Sellers' "Being There" character, too. Viktor is a blank, and the people he meets — airport employees, a flight attendant (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a snide airport manager (Stanley Tucci) — see in him what they want to see.

Viktor is immediately likable because he's played by Hanks, but he becomes more compelling as Hanks bring him into focus. Like the immigrants on whose back this country was built, Viktor brings unique skills to his quest to survive here. And he shows a canny ability to pick up the American way of getting things done, too, outwitting Tucci at every turn (although Tucci's overwritten, overacted petty nastycrat is the movie's most notable defect).

I also wonder if "The Terminal" coasts too much on Hanks' charisma. The movie waits a long time before beginning to reveal his secrets, probably because they turn out to be pretty small secrets. It's an interesting flaw in a movie that uses the word "waiting" a lot.

Some of the characters are waiting for dreams that aren't worthwhile. Some are aimlessly wasting their time. Some are sticking around for something wonderful. Which of those applies to Viktor? The answer is worth the wait.

Hanks and Spielberg together again in 'Terminal'

From left, Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones and director Steven Spielberg on the set of "The Terminal," which opens today. DreamWorks Pictures

"This movie was really a big deal for me," says Hanks. "I had been pinching myself because I couldn't believe I was doing it. And then we start working, and I see that the 2-1/2 pages of dialogue I had to shoot for the next scene were just bad, idiotic. And I knew I was going to have to talk to Steven about it, and because we were friends before we were collaborators, it was a lot harder than it would be usually with a director.

"So I get to the set, and I'm in the hair-and-makeup trailer fretting about this, and Steven comes in and says: 'Tom, that dialogue in the next scene is just unfixable so I'm just going to take it out. I'll cover the thing visually.'

"And it was at that moment I thought, you know, this thing really could work out."

Today, the collaboration that began with "Saving Private Ryan" continues with the third feature film starring Tom Hanks and directed by Steven Spielberg.

"The Terminal" was loosely inspired by the true story of an Iranian refugee who has been living in Charles de Gaulle International Airport in France since 1988, having arrived there with no passport. (He has since proven his political refugee status, but chooses to remain in the airport.)

"We talk about various projects a lot, pass things to each other," says Spielberg. "But we seem to know which ones will be right. 'Catch Me If You Can' we sort of knew from the start would be right. Tom was on this one before me, but when I got a look at a rewrite by Jeff Nathanson, I got excited enough to want to do it together."

Hanks had already signed on to "The Terminal," in which he plays Viktor Navorski, a citizen of a fictional Balkan state called Krakozhia. ("I just didn't want to pick on Bulgaria or Albania, like they did in 'Wag the Dog' by creating a war that doesn't exist for the sake of a movie. They have enough real problems there," says Spielberg.)

As Viktor is going through customs at an unidentified New York City airport, a military coup in his country renders his passport invalid.

That leaves him unable to enter the United States or to return to Krakozhia, and Viktor's problem is exacerbated by an ambitious customs official (Stanley Tucci) who does his best to be unhelpful.

"The tone was everything in this, because we're telling a simple story," Spielberg said. "But we're hoping to make a point or two without being too obvious."

To Spielberg, the point was the way the United States appears to be moving away from being the great melting pot, toward "tribalization."

"We're going through this period of self-segregation, as the sociologists call it," Spielberg says.

"But if you ever have occasion to be in the international lounge of a metropolitan airport, you realize the circumstances don't allow that. Everybody is doing the same thing. Waiting, worrying, wondering what's going to happen next."

Neither Hanks nor Spielberg wanted to make a movie full of sad faces. Their "Terminal" is a place where an angry Indian immigrant (Kumar Pallana) or a sad stewardess from Nebraska (Catherine Zeta-Jones) can, with help from people very unlike them, rediscover the best parts of themselves. It's where a shy Mexican food-service worker (Diego Luna) can find the courage to declare his affection for the suspicious African-American immigration clerk (Zoe Saldana), who daily stamps "rejected" on an ever-hopeful Viktor's visa application.

"It was more comedy than I've ever done before," says Spielberg, "but we've been calling it serious comedy. I'm still uncomfortable with the idea of making a movie that's nothing but jokes. But I've definitely been lightening up after 'Ryan' and 'Schindler's List,' and that's a conscious thing.

"I know I'll return to serious material eventually, but I really like the idea of just entertaining audiences again.

"And, of course, Tom and I are on the same wavelength. We make movies together for the same reason we became pals, I think. We both came from broken homes, so we tend to put a high value on families and being with our families. The things that make him smile make me smile, and we have a lot of the same interests — and that gets reflected in the movies."