Hanks stars in good, but Terminal-ly slow movie

A sci-fi spectacular? No. A film brimming with special effects? No. Any goblins, trolls, orcs, a magic ring, hobbits, an extra-terrestrial or mechanical sharks featured in the flick? No, none of the above.

The only thing depressing or disturbing about this movie is the title, which could evoke feelings of death, loss, and over-the-top drama, but that’s it.

Once you get past the gloomy name, the movie itself is, in fact, one of the funniest and more intelligent comedic dramas made this year.

Re-teaming Steven Spielberg with his partner in crime, Tom Hanks, this movie might be the cleverest comedy this summer. Incorporating some original gags, while utilizing some tried and true strategies, the movie successfully demands that its audience laugh, cry, and overall, feel sympathy towards Viktor Navorski, the movie’s hero and main character, deftly performed by Tom Hanks.

Navorsky is a man without a country. He has lost his right to obtain a visa to enter the United States at New York’s JFK International after a rebel coup has seized control of his country’s government.

The country in question is called Krakozhia, a vaguely Eastern European country as fictional as Navorski himself; a country that has, in effect, been declared void by the United States after the ruling government was overthrown, thereby causing all passports issued to its citizens to be declared void as well. Navorski arrives at JFK just after this governmental coup. Ironically, the coup occurred while he was in mid-flight, which in turn results in the discovery that he will not be allowed to set foot on American soil.

Navorski becomes the responsibility of Frank Dixon, the director of security at JFK. Performed with skill by Stanley Tucci (The Core, Road to Perdition), audiences will immediately identify Dixon as the movie’s hard-nosed, by-the-book authority figure and arch-villain. Dixon, bound by code rules and his ambition to be promoted to a higher position, sees Navorski as a fly on the wall, someone who has fallen through the cracks of the system, and one who stands in the way of his attempts at a perfect administrative record.

The only option Dixon has is to allow Navorsky to dwell indefinitely within the confines of the International Terminal until his passport clears, all the while hoping that Navorski will attempt to escape to New York, be arrested, and become someone else’s problem.

However, Navorski, having been told to stay in the terminal and wait, does just that. He waits...and waits...and waits. He never breaks the rules, nor does he even attempt to break them. He stays in the terminal until he is told he can leave, which depends upon how long the coup in his country will last, which, in fact, turns out to be quite a long time.

This is the whole premise of the movie, and while it may seem trite, in the hands of Spielberg, it quickly becomes an intimate character study about Viktor and the strangers he interacts with at JFK.

The plot and the premise behind this movie, while implausible, are used to set up Navorsky’s interactions with the other employees of the airport.

One of the first people he meets is Gupta (Kumar Pallana), a janitor working in the terminal who has a pathological comedic urge to see people slip on his wet floors.

At first sight, Gupta seems mentally unbalanced, but as the movie progresses, we see he in fact has a heart of gold, and his own personal reasons for working at the airport.

Other people Navorski meets during his stay include two baggage handlers played by Chi McBride (Boston Public), and Diego Luna (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Dirty Dancing Havana Nights), who help Navorsky survive by giving him airline food in exchange for advice.

Then there is the stewardess, Amelia Warren, portrayed by Academy-Award-winning Catherine Zeta-Jones (Chicago, The Mask of Zorro). She plays Navorski’s token love interest during his extended stay at JFK. She seems to be nice enough when we are first introduced to her, but more is learned about her character throughout the movie, which may cause some female audience members not to want to sympathize for her.

Even though the audience is likely to be cheering for Navorski to win Amelia over, many may be disappointed at how the relationship actually turns out in the end.

The main plot really doesn’t move along quite as fast as you may expect in a Steven Spielberg movie. There don’t appear to be any spectacular plot twists, or any disastrous consequences of any kind, nor were there intended to be any.

What really drives this movie along is Hank’s portrayal and characterizations of Navorski’s plight. Hank gets Navorski, and the audience identifies with Navorski through Hanks.

The movie’s strong points are in the small details and the elaborate depictions of the people in the airport. It is almost as if you have secret access to the information about their private personal lives and personalities.

Since the plot is so simple and moves along at a snail’s pace, the characters, especially Tom Hanks’ Navorski, are what drive this movie.

One of the more interesting side stories chronicled is that of the love story between Diego Luna’s character and a beautiful INS agent played by Zoe Saldana (Drumline, Centerstage).

Navorski helps Luna’s character to win over this girl by passing messages back and forth between the two in exchange for a subsistence of airline food.

It’s nice to see Hanks share the spotlight with his younger co-stars in a movie that focuses on developing the complexities of the relationships between characters. Overall, this movie seems to merge all the genres that Hanks has dominated since the late 1980‘s: comedy, drama, romance-and does it right.

There is hardly ever a dull moment in the movie, beginning when we see Navorski get off his plane not knowing a single word of English, and culminating when we finally see him leave JFK. (Yes, he eventually is able to leave). It is a movie that strongly builds its characters without being pretentious, or overly stuffed with special effects. Overall, the time spent in this terminal is time well-spent.