Examining the gain of identity in a faceless airport

The Terminal (2004)
Dreamworks Pictures presents a Steven Spielberg film, starring Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Written by Andrew Niccol, Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson. 128m. Rated PG-13 for brief language and drug references.

4 stars

If you’ve ever been on a flight on a commercial airliner, you may have experienced the feeling of hopelessness associated with the “de-personalization” of the event.

To the carrier, you can’t help but feeling you’re just the amalgam of the documents you present. It’s reflected in the way the attendant doesn’t make eye contact with you before she feeds your boarding document into the processor. They look at your face, but only the one reflected into the time-preserved DMV shot on your license. Mostly, they’re looking for a strange sort of validity. Are you say who you are and if you’re not, who are you?

For Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), this feeling is intensified after he lands in John F. Kennedy International Airport, located in a quasi-undefined area between Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island. Navorski is on a sojourn from Krakozhia, an Eastern European enclave that has picked an unfortunate time to be subject to a military coup.

When Navorski lands, he is detained by the immigration detail led by Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci). Through pantomime and Navorski’s narrow grasp of the English language, Dixon tells Navorski he has fallen through a bureaucratic crack. In Dixon’s words, Navorski has become “unacceptable” - neither able to return to war-torn Krakozhia nor allowed to enter United States soil without proper credentials.

The story is loosely based on the tale of Merhan Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian who has lived in France’s Charles De Gaulle airport since 1988. Nasseri fell into a legal quandary when his documentation was lost aboard a Paris train station. He entered the airport as a refugee, but his loss of credentials did not allow him to set foot on French ground. In 1999, he was granted a French residency permit. But Nasseri hasn’t left Terminal One yet.

Nasseri’s tale is one mixed with an appropriate measure of sadness, like the story of Brooks - a fictional character from “The Shawshank Redemption” who becomes so ingrained in the prison system that he cannot tolerate the outside world when he’s paroled.

In “The Terminal,” the screenwriters appropriate the story in a comedic fashion, extolling Navorski’s innate ability to be well liked accidentally, in the same manner of another classic Hanks character, Forrest Gump. In an English-speaking country, a lack of communication skills is a retard to progress.

Spielberg movies are often done in by some overt sentimentality, but in “The Terminal” it doesn’t spiral out of control. Navorski will find relating to United stewardess Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) more difficult than imaginable in a lesser movie. Dixon seems more conflicted than the average “bad guy” - there’s a redeemable part within him, even if he sometimes acts like the world’s biggest apple-polisher or drill sergeant.

The movie’s strength is in slowly revealing Navorski as more than just an unlucky fellow stuck in an airport, waiting for his turn. The finer moments are in the hours after the airport closes, when the Russian demonstrates his inherent prowess in woodworking, design, painting, and oh yes, jazz.

His friends are fellow forgotten folk - a baggage handler (Chi McBride), a janitor (Kumar Pallana) and the lad that restocks the airlines pre-packaged meals (Diego Luna). Their affinity for each other is in their commonality of “anonymousness”: Passengers don’t have time to chat with those in the minimum-wage professions, let alone read signs that don’t help them get their to gate in most efficient way possible. Just as a person departing from JFK don’t seem to notice Navorski, they also similarly ignore the dozens of people it takes for them to arrive at their destination on time with their baggage and their single-serving meal.

By the end, Navorski has become a rallying cry for every airport employee disenfranchised with the inhumanity of the immigration system. His struggle - which fulfills a dream of his deceased father - is embraced by all in a sort of sentimentality usually reserved for more naive films of the 1940s.

“The Terminal” becomes a story not about whether or not one man is within his legal right to see the states, but of the making of a man. In the International Lounge of the JFK International Airport, Viktor Navorski - with his innocent sense of humor, his simple altruism and his kindly offer of friendship - became the most cherished individual in a sea of anonymous faces.