The Terminal: Sweet Poison for the Masses
a spoiler-filled response
Last summer, I watched a seemingly innocuous comedy that catalyzed a few things for me and set in motion this impulse to write regular movie blurbs from a personal, faith-enriched perspective. That movie was Stephen Spielberg’s The Terminal (2004).
The story has all the trappings of a familiar romance: an honest man committed to an altruistic cause, a beautiful but initially unavailable love interest, hilarious secondary characters, and the comic Tom Hanks of yore. It does something very curious, however, towards the conclusion. Not only does the romantic couple not have their own happily ever after, but the heroine gets the shaft . . .
You see, by this point in the movie Catherine Zeta Jones’s Amelia has told Hanks’s Viktor about her long string of affairs with married men who flag her down whenever she flies into town. Amelia is not happy—her sense of self-worth and her emotional health are taking a slow nose-dive together. The foreigner’s kindness offers Amelia a different kind of intimacy, their friendship deepening each time she passes through the terminal in which the temporarily nationless man is residing (when rebels overthrow his country’s government, airport security takes his passport—turning Viktor into an airport indigent). Amelia’s self-confidence returns as this friendship deepens, and she ultimately decides to pull out of her most recent affair and pursue this healthier relationship.
The film could easily have ended at this point. The camera’s slow pull-back from a warmly romantic scene even encourages, for just a moment, the sense that the story will end with Amelia and Viktor on the way to a long-lasting, mutually beneficial liaison.
But then the screenwriter decides to send the requisite, ironic curveball mandated by a film industry that abhors appearing sentimental or naïve. Amelia secretly returns to her old lover because he has political connections that can get Viktor out of the airport and into America, enabling him to complete his international journey’s end-objective. In other words, she sacrifices her newly won self-worth so the protagonist can bring to a comfortable close the parallel storyline about his traveling to the United States to realize his deceased father’s dream of collecting all the signatures from the jazz musicians captured in an old photograph, a dream which the film loudly claims is worth the cost of prostituting the heroine. The film suggests that the hero’s brief encounter with this musician is more valuable than the heroine’s attempt to reclaim her entire life.
It’s the kind of ending that didn’t raise an eyebrow among contemporary critics. When the conclusion of Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) tacked on an intensely pathetic scene in which the robot child finally reconnects (after a fashion) with the only mother-figure he ever knew, reviewers were outraged at the Dickensian sentiment. They claimed almost unanimously that the movie should have ended fifteen minutes earlier with the image of the young android staring longingly through the dark ocean depths towards an inert female statue. Apparently, that would have been more poetic, and a much more faithful picture of the human condition—fraught as it is with broken dreams and unreciprocated affections.
The Terminal could have easily ended fifteen or so minutes earlier too, fading away from the picture of a hope-filled, romantic embrace shared by the two main characters. But that would have been just too sappy. Fractured relationship is so much more . . . honest.
Or so Hollywood would have us believe.
written Feb. 12, 2005
Posted by Paul Marchbanks at May 1, 2005 3:01 PM
Comments
In addition to posting commments here, those interested in other opinions about this film might want to check out the ongoing conversation under an earlier Terminal entry. Just do a search for "Terminal" using the index page's search engine.
Posted by: Paul Marchbanks at June 1, 2005 3:40 PM