'The Terminal': An Émigré's Paradise Lost and Found

The New York Times > Movies > Movie Review : "The word terminal itself, which supplies the title for Steven Spielberg's new film opening today nationwide, also has some darker connotations that tug against its unassuming everyday meaning. Its etymology - termini were the local gods whose shrines served as boundary markers in the ancient Roman world - suggests a frontier between worlds, while its modern medical usage associates the word with mortality. To be trapped indefinitely in a terminal, then, without recourse to either flight or ground transportation, can be imagined as a kind of living death, a nerve-racking state of perpetual limbo.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that Mr. Spielberg has transformed this quintessential modern nightmare of interrupted air travel into a vision of earthly paradise. The director's lyrical view of flight was evident long before "Catch Me if You Can," his soulful, finger-popping evocation of the golden age of commercial aviation: it could be glimpsed in the flashing spaceship lights at the end of "Close Encounters"; in the soaring bicycle of "E.T."; even in the Japanese fighter planes of "1941" and "Empire of the Sun." (Tact forbids me from saying too much about "Always.") "The Terminal," at once following this preoccupation to its logical conclusion and (so to speak) flying in the face of it, is, improbably and enchantingly, about the romance of being stuck on the ground.

Ms. Zeta-Jones is as spirited and lovely as ever, but the movie is content to use her for her looks rather than for the arch, self-mocking wit that is her secret weapon as a comic actress. (So far, Rob Marshall in "Chicago" and Joe Roth in the otherwise dreary "America's Sweethearts" are the only directors to recognize this quality. The rest, Mr. Spielberg included, seem unnerved by the notion that a woman of such regal beauty could actually be funny.)

There is a superficial resemblance between this character and the all-American Crusoe Mr. Hanks played in "Cast Away," but Viktor arrives from Krakozia already in possession of the stoicism it took Chuck Noland more than four years on a desert island to acquire. In some ways his journey is the reverse of Chuck's. Chuck, cast out of modern consumer society, learned to make do with very little. Victor, coming from circumstances of relative privation, must adapt to a scene of surreal and prodigious abundance."