The Terminal is the only genuinely contemporary film by Steven Spielberg, who is, ironically and rightly, considered terribly emblematic of contemporary American film. And it’s also the only outright failure of his semi-vaunted “late period,” the post-Private Ryan boom that saw him look to the future with mixed results (the intermittently stunning A.I. and the stunningly intermittent Minority Report) before retreating to a recent and iconic past in the pleasantly unchallenging Catch Me If You Can.

That film featured a virtuoso chase sequence in an airport, with Tom Hanks’s dogged FBI man pursuing Leonardo DiCaprio’s slick underage shyster through a labyrinth of diverting period décor and long-legged, candy-colored flight attendants. In The Terminal, Hanks is recast in the role of the pursued, sort of: as the film opens, his politely uncomprehending “Krakhozian” (think Balkan with Russian inflections) émigré, Viktor Navorski, is being shepherded through a recreation of New York’s JFK international airport by an array of predatory handlers. Their job is ostensibly to help Viktor, who speaks little English—he’s mastered “yes” as a sort of defense mechanism—understand that, due to a military coup in his home country that occurred during his flight, he’s “unacceptable” for assimilation into the United States. Their task is not satisfactorily completed.

It’s not exactly a chase, but the staccato barrage of bureaucratic language and counterfeit sympathy lends it the feel of a soft-pedal assault, and our best hope for Viktor, short of a plane ticket out of there, is a corner to hide in. Luckily, Spielberg’s airport has no shortage of these, and The Terminal becomes the inverse of Cast Away: a study of isolation amidst the huddled masses. Viktor must live in the airport until his visa clears, or, as the put-upon airport director played by Stanley Tucci hopes, until an escape attempt makes him the problem of the New York City authorities.

As a set-up, it surely reads well, and as choreographed onscreen, it raises our expectations accordingly. Upon learning of his country’s bloody dissolution from an airport lounge newscast, a panicked, emotionally blindsided Viktor—who can only recognize the word “Krakhozia” on the news ticker and then associate it with the images of chaos—begins a wild search across the terminal’s various levels for a television that will replay the story. The terrible exhilaration of the scene, played by Hanks with the same fevered physicality he brought to the best parts of Cast Away, reaches its peak when Viktor blindly tosses his cumbersome suitcase onto an ascending escalator while he sprints up a parallel set of stairs, divested of one very tangible burden so as to hasten his interface with the unthinkable.

Unfortunately, it’s all down escalators from there. Viktor’s idyll in the terminal, so rife with potential as a metaphor for the dislocation felt by newcomers to our continent of obscene plenitude, mutates into an icky romantic comedy (Catherine Zeta Jones is even more unsympathetic than usual as Viktor’s frazzled flight attendant love interest) and an even ickier display of its director’s unstintingly well-intentioned liberalism gone horribly awry. A clumsy Rainbow Coalition of supporting characters, including a clownish Indian janitor, a Don Juan-ish Latino food service worker, and a sassily avuncular black cart driver, are enlisted to serve both as friends and Greek chorus for the ever-resourceful Viktor, who, through no real fault of Hanks’s performance, is presented as a walking malaprop: a bulkier Balki, if you will.

It’s an attempt to present the Melting Pot of today’s United States, but where a film like John Sayles’s The Brother from Another Planet was able to meld an identical conceit to an unfailingly plugged-in cultural sensibility, The Terminal feels consistently like the work of squares. Spielberg’s imagination, limitless in conjuring both the advances of our impending future (A.I., Minority Report) or, more regularly, the rough intrusion of the fantastic on the mundane (Jaws, Close Encounters, E.T., Jurassic Park) fails him in the creation of a present where there are no dinosaurs waiting to be unleashed. Had The Terminal been set in the past—say, at that eye-popping retro Catch Me If You Can airport—it might have played to his other great strength, that of re-creation. It also might then have been justified in its ludicrously oversimplified depiction of America, in microcosm, as a wholly conquerable capitalist amusement park populated by supportive bystanders.

By the time the film reveals the reasons for Viktor’s attempted visit—amazingly lame, the revelation also invokes an awkward left-field exoticism, played to the back balcony of middle-class mores: it turns out that all this pasty Krakhozian really wanted was to commiserate with an aging black jazz musician. Again, the intention is sound—music as a universal common denominato—but Catch Me If You Can notwithstanding, is there any director less jazzy, less freeform, than Steven Spielberg? His style is predicated on the sort of cosmic fanfares associated with John Williams, not John Coltrane. His best up-tempo films, from Jaws to Raiders of the Lost Ark to Jurassic Park, are kinetic but never loose—rigorous kerfuffles, all. His more subdued successes, from E.T. to Schindler’s List and even A.I., thrive within the confines of visual and narrative classicism.

That’s where The Terminal wants to be, but the empty ante-upping of the script—Viktor sticks it to the Man, Viktor sweeps the hottie off her feet, Viktor becomes a folk hero to the terminal’s many wage slaves—keeps the rhythms erratic and, least fortunate of all, provides Spielberg ample opportunities to indulge in easy sentiment, unquestionably his favorite kind. It’s a hallmark of Tom Hanks’ better performances, be it in affable dreck like Sleepless in Seattle or real crap like Forrest Gump, that even his most actorly excesses—the lopsidedly smarmy good-guy grin, the dewy-eyed naïf transparency—feel earned within the character’s given arc. He’s been treated especially well by Spielberg, carrying Saving Private Ryan with his soft-lob performance and being rewarded with the best lines in Catch Me If You Can, but not so here—the potency of the set-up means we’re predisposed to like Viktor at the start, but the movie gives us fewer and fewer reasons to care as it lurches on. And those it does supply are not merely insufficient, but occasionally—as when the aforementioned clownish Indian janitor stares down a plane in a moment of immigrant solidarity meant, for some awful reason, to recall footage of Tiananmen square—downright insulting and off-putting.

Occasional moments of catch-in-the-throat visual beauty come courtesy of godlike-genius DP Janusz Kaminski, but you can’t baste horsemeat with muscadet.
—ADAM NAYMAN