Blessed with an expressive, touching performance by Tom Hanks, The Terminal is a warmly humanistic comedy-drama, writes Michael Dwyer.
The downside of 21st-century travel is having to spend more and more time in airports, blandly antiseptic environments that are more crowded and security-conscious than ever before. Regular travellers - and anyone who has ever had the misfortune to be the victim of overbooking or airport bureaucracy - will empathise with the protagonist of The Terminal.
He is Viktor Navorksi (Tom Hanks), who is on his first flight to the US while a military coup takes place in his native land, the fictional country of Krakozia. He arrives in New York with barely enough English phrases to deal with taxis and hotels. Going through immigration at JFK, he learns of the coup and discovers that his country has revoked all travelling privileges and that his visa is now void. The US authorities won't let him enter the country - or let him leave to return home.
Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), a by-the-book Homeland Security official, tells Navorski that he has "fallen though a small crack in the system", and the hapless visitor is held in the international tourist lounge while the authorities attempt to cope with his unprecedented plight. Dixon, who is primed for promotion, wishes that Navorksi could become "somebody else's problem".
Forced to spend his days in this anodyne space, where the muzak is incessant and there is nothing to do but shop, Navorski draws on his own ingenuity to survive. He also benefits from the kindness of strangers, airport cleaning and catering staff fascinated by his behaviour and sympathetic to his dilemma.
The film was shot on a vast, minutely detailed and entirely convincing set, and Janusz Kaminski's fluid, mobile camerawork takes the viewer deep inside the recesses of an airport that passengers never see - where the staff dine on caviar left behind by Aeroflot and play cards to win items from the lost and found department, among them Cher's underwear.
Working from an original and quite ingenious screenplay that is structured as a series of diverting vignettes, Spielberg treats this imaginative material with the same deft lightness of touch he applied so effectively to his last film with Hanks, Catch Me If You Can.
Hanks, who has hardly more dialogue than he was given in Cast Away, is a delight to savour in one of his most expressive performances. Spielberg's regular composer, John Williams, provides a lovely, aptly breezy score to accompany this charming, warm-hearted and enchanting entertainment.
