The terminal, review: 'tom hanks's airport fable is full of charm'

Sukhdev Sandhu 18 December 2016 5:35pm GMT The Terminal's tale of a man marooned in an airport has plenty of charm – but Steven Spielberg seems fatally unsure what he's trying to

say. DIR: STEVEN SPIELBERG; STARRING: TOM HANKS, CATHERINE ZETA JONES, CHI MCBRIDE, STANLEY TUCCI. 12A CERT, 129 MIN STEVEN SPIELBERG'S THE TERMINAL is based, very loosely at times, on

the true story of Mehran Nasseri, a British-Iranian who for 16 years has been officially stateless and living alone in Terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris. In the '70s he was

jailed in Tehran for protesting against the Shah. He was later given refugee status in Belgium, but claims to have had his papers stolen. Now, lacking a passport, he has nowhere to go. To

some, he's insane or a con merchant. To others, he's a peculiarly potent symbol for an era of mass travel in which it's easy to feel that one is in permanent transit. More

than that, he stands for all the millions of displaced peoples who are currently marooned between countries, on a possibly fruitless search for a land they can call their own. It's

important to remind ourselves of Nasseri's story, not just because it's fascinating in itself, but because, even in such a brief synopsis as this, it has an eerie resonance that

The Terminal, for all its sincerity and sporadic high points, is entirely lacking. Tom Hanks plays Viktor Navorski, a mild-mannered tourist from a Central European nation called Krakozhia

that descends into civil war right after he leaves it to fly to New York, where he plans to work as a building contractor. Straight away he's detained by the acting head of the Homeland

Security Department, one Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), who is as precise and vacuum-wrapped in his interactions with the confused traveller as the packed lunch he brings to work each day.

They make for a strange double act, this well-meaning and jovial Slav, and the rule-stickling American. Together they embark on a cat-and-mouse game in which every effort by Navorski to

leave the airport, or even to make his life more bearable, not least by retrieving coins from abandoned luggage trolleys, is stifled. Hanks reprises his role in Cast Away, only this time the

desert island on which he finds himself trapped is a vast and lonely concourse. He's a practical man, able like the Americans whom he hopes to join in Manhattan to believe in a better

tomorrow. He learns to feast on ketchup-drenched crackers, to build a shelter out of uncomfortable airport seats, and to make friends with cleaners and porters. He is, for all his isolation,

less alone than Dixon. If I had my way, I would have had Viktor played by Sacha Baron Cohen in his Borat character. Still, Hanks is not at all bad, despite an accent as exaggerated as

anything heard on the '70s sitcom Mind Your Language. He has an Everyman quality to him that is sometimes wrongly derided as blandness. Whether he's making the best of homonymic

gags ("he cheat" misheard as "eat shit", "man of mystery" as "man of misery"), acting as a romantic go-between for one of his new-found pals, or

playing the romantic suitor himself with a troubled air stewardess (Catherine Zeta-Jones), he always disarms us. I'm not sure though whether we should be disarmed though. The Terminal

is released at a time when American airports are so security conscious that they resemble military zones. But Spielberg, despite the film's potentially discomforting connotations, is

too eager to focus on light rather than darkness. Apart from humourless Dixon, the security staff come across as friends rather than as armed patrols. The photography, by normally reliable

Janusz Kaminski, softens and renders homely a place that Viktor would surely view as a lingering, in-between perdition. John Williams's score, too, is bubblier than the maddening

drones, beeps and electronic chatter of most real airports. Spielberg, normally one of the most assured directors when it comes to tone and register, here seems unsure of what he's

trying to do. The screenplay, by Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson, doesn't always help. The comedy, all pratfalls on slippery floors and over-the-top reactions to beeping pagers, is

exaggerated. The romance between Hanks and Zeta-Jones (including a protracted riff about Napoleon and Josephine) is fanciful, while a late-developing sub-plot strikes a false note. Darker

episodes, including one in which Viktor acts to stop a fellow Slav from slashing himself, seem plain incongruous. Away from centre stage the supporting cast – among them Chi McBride, Diego

Luna, and the always-delightful Kumar Pallana (Pagoda in The Royal Tenenbaums) as a cleaner who likes to watch people fall on the wet floors ("It's the only fun I have") - are

excellent. But, whereas Stephen Frears used the hard-pressed cosmopolitanism of the hotel staff in Dirty Pretty Things as a way of exposing a Britain all too often hidden from public view,

here the support workers are used merely as PR for melting-pot America. And, for all its good performances, fleeting charm, and overlong but pleasant enough narrative, advertising is what

most damages this film. Early on Frank says: "There's only one thing you can do here, Mr Navorski – shop." We know that airports these days function as alternative shopping

malls. But it's still aggravating to see product placements litter nearly every scene. It's tacky, and it diminishes the drama: Viktor, upon hearing about the crisis in Krakozhia,

tries in vain to ring home; it's a desperate moment and the camera zooms out, in order, we think, to create a powerful shot of him all alone and adrift in the world. Instead, it allows

Spielberg to incorporate a huge telecom logo into the frame. A shabby moment. _This review was originally published on the date 1 January 2014 _ From Charlie Brown to Krampus: the 25 best

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