'But aren't you afraid of something?' 'I am afraid for. 'Are you afraid of returning to your country?' 'Not afraid,' he says simply. He won't even lie when Dixon offers him political asylum. You place him back in the water, so that someone else can have the pleasure of catching him.'ĭixon could arrest Navorski unfairly, but refuses to: 'He has to break the law.' Navorski, who speaks little English but is learning every day, refuses to break the law. Dixon's plan is to pass Navorski on to another jurisdiction: 'You catch a small fish and unhook him very carefully. 'Why doesn't he escape?' Dixon asks his underlings, as Navorski stands next to an open door that Dixon has deliberately left unguarded. 'The Terminal' is like a sunny Kakfa story, in which it is the citizen who persecutes the bureaucracy.ĭixon wants Navorski out of the terminal because, well, he can't live there forever, but he shows every indication of being prepared to. He has slipped through a perfect logical loophole.

The immigration service, and indeed the American legal system, has no way of dealing with him because Viktor does not do, or fail to do, any of the things the system is set up to prevent him from doing, or not doing.

He has no guile, no hidden motives, no suspicion of others. Navorski is a man unlike any Dixon has ever encountered - a man who is exactly who he seems to be and claims to be. Navorski is returning luggage carts to the racks to collect the refund, and spending his profits on food. 'He's found out about the quarters,' he says one day, staring grimly at a surveillance monitor. Sometimes the rules are cruel, but he takes no joy in the cruelty.Īs Navorski lingers day after day in the arrivals lounge, Dixon's impatience grows. He goes by the rules, but he has no great love of the rules. In 'The Terminal,' Viktor Navorski's unintended victim is Dixon, the customs and immigrations official, played by Stanley Tucci with an intriguing balance between rigidity and curiosity. Spielberg gives Hanks the time and space to develop elaborate situations like those Tati was always getting himself into, situations where the lives of those around him became baffling because of Tati's own profound simplicity. It has another inspiration, the work of the French actor-filmmaker Jacques Tati. There is a humanity in its humor that reminds you of sequences in Chaplin or Keaton where comedy and sadness find a fragile balance. Spielberg, his actors and writers ( Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson) weave it into a human comedy that is gentle and true, that creates sympathy for all of its characters, that finds a tone that will carry them through, that made me unreasonably happy. This premise could have yielded a film of contrivance and labored invention.

The terminal cast