Now, sadly, it seems Nasseri has gone a bit mad and refuses to leave the airport for any country save England, which is not an option for him. The real Viktor Navorski, a displaced Iranian named Merhan Karimi Nasseri, was stuck in Charles De Gaulle Airport for over seven years before the two European governments made any attempt to resolve his situation. What they will likely not learn much about are the real hard-hearted villains in the "Viktor Navorski Story." You see, for all the evil legalism embodied by Tucci, the pigheaded bureaucracy that provided the inspiration for this film stemmed not from the US Department of Homeland Security, but from Belgium and France's refugee-wary immigration authorities. Those audience members inclined to phobia over the Patriot Act will no doubt see this plot (and Tucci's character) as a ringing indictment of both it and the agency Tom Ridge heads. When Dixon insists on taking medication away from a man who needs it for a dying father, it is Viktor who finds a loophole in the security system that will allow the foreigner to return home with the life-saving drugs. Viktor represents kindness and reason, Dixon, the rigid legalism that is so obsessed with security it can't see people for regulation. He sets his jaw, and offers a simple, "I wait." And wait he does, willing to endure any humiliation the Department of Homeland Security can dish out, including blocking his means to purchase food for himself. Even when he is literally invited by top dog Tucci to break the law by sneaking out the sliding glass doors that lead to freedom, Navorski refuses to circumvent regulation. No matter where he is, Viktor maintains a high standard of morality and compassion, and this wins him a loyal fan base of employees throughout the airport. With little else to do as he watches other people's flights come and go, Viktor sets up a make-shift home in the crack he has fallen into.ĭespite its grounding in semi-reality, there remains something fantastic about this story. His only choice is to linger in the terminal and hope that peace will soon return to his war-torn homeland. With a passport from a government that no longer exists, Viktor cannot enter the US and he cannot board a flight for home. Or, as the maniacally ambitious airport head of Homeland Security Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci) explains it, Viktor is "unacceptable" to any nation. Tom Hanks stars as Viktor Navorski, an international traveler who lands at New York's JFK Airport only to find that a bloody coup in his fictional Slavic homeland of Krakozhia has rendered him stateless. These will be people, of course, who have themselves never held a federal position and taken it as part of their job description to make people wait longer than is ever humanly necessary. They might, as reasonable people, be tempted to dismiss the idea that any bureaucracy could be so inflexible as to leave a man floundering in airport limbo for nearly a year. This tidbit has much bearing on the enjoyment of the film as the average movie-going citizen might find the premise of an innocent tourist so victimized by governmental red tape implausible. Rather, it is the fact that not only is the story of Viktor Navorski, a man trapped in JFK airport for nine months, loosely based on a true story, but that the actual airport refugee has been confined to a single terminal for over ten years. And it's not that Spielberg breaks a cardinal rule of the summer "feel good" flick yet nevertheless leaves the audience feeling great. The most surprising thing about "The Terminal," the new film that reunites cinematic Dream Team Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks is not that it relies on good-hearted wit, good acting, and a story that highlights simple human goodness to entertain.
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