BEFORE: Tom Hanks stars in a film about people with deadly illnesses - just kidding! It's another plane-related story, or more specifically an airport-related story. It's the last one, I promise. I think you can probably tell that this film was next to "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" on my watchlist for a very long time, and then those other films got added and separated them. Linking from "Flightplan", Sean Bean was also in the recent "Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters" with Stanley Tucci (last seen in "Billy Bathgate").
THE PLOT: An eastern European immigrant finds himself stranded in JFK airport, and must take up temporary residence there.
AFTER: For extra points, we're also in a confined space again tonight (the airport terminal) and the lead character is grieving after a deceased family member - so this adds to several running themes. But the whole situation comes about because while he's on the way to New York, there is a revolution in his country, and it essentially ceases to exist. So there's a loophole (apparently) in the immigration laws where he can't enter the U.S. because he doesn't have a visa, or a passport from a recognized country. And he (apparently) can't go back to his home country for a similarly arcane reason.
Which leaves the airport - if you believe that the airport is some kind of non-country, even though it's inside the U.S. it's not part of the U.S. I'm not sure I buy this theory, since it's a place where U.S. citizens work and their salaries are subject to payroll taxes and I'm betting if you killed somebody at the airport, you'd stand trial in that city and not in front of the World Court in the Hague. For that matter, I never understood how all that malarkey works with "U.S. soil" in our embassies around the world. Who took the time to dig up the dirt that was there and put down some good old American dirt before building the embassy? Somehow we've got real estate in all these foreign countries, and the space in those buildings belongs to our country, not theirs, and it all starts to sound like when you'd be fighting with your sister in the back seat of the car and your Mom would draw an invisible line between you that you can't cross, or else Dad will turn the car RIGHT AROUND and head home.
So our traveler has the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You hear that a lot, right? People saying someone was in the wrong place at the wrong time, like if they got hit with a stray bullet or something. And people often complain about missing out on things by saying they were in the right place, but the wrong time - ooh, so close, dude! But you almost never hear about anyone who was in the wrong place at the right time. I guess you'd have to be a time-traveler who was failing his mission, or maybe you'd have to be lost in some city just when some money was falling out of an armored car or something. I guess it's pretty rare, though the next time I'm late for work, I'm going to try and say I was just in the wrong place at the right time.
You can also stay in the right place for the wrong amount of time. Like maybe you've been working at a good job, but you stay so long you're missing out on other opportunities. You get the idea - maybe they're still paying you so it's hard to leave, because you don't know if that means it's the best place where you're supposed to be, or if you've overstayed your welcome, because you're still doing the same stuff you did years ago. There are many different forms of prisons, and some of them fool you by looking quite nice and giving you a paycheck.
You might think I'm overstating things, but I don't believe so. This film shares much of its DNA with a prison film such as "The Shawshank Redemption" - a "fish out of water" is kept in a confined space, and he has to figure out the rules of engagement with the various groups around him in order to survive, until he can find a way out. The visa officer is like the parole board, and the main immigration supervisor is like the warden. He even keeps getting rid of the amenities in the terminal to make Viktor's life more miserable - that's when I figured out the prison analogy.
I'd like to think I could survive in a foreign country, even if I didn't know the language. Provided I had money, of course, and I could point at food. Heck, I know so many names of foods from around the world, all the rest is just figuring out the numbers. And despite what what was seen in that other film, you don't even need to have "Yes" and "No" tattooed on your hands because you can just NOD YOUR HEAD. There, isn't that a lot easier?
The plight of the main character is echoed in the situations of the people around him - the customs official who's been at his job for so long, the janitor who also can't return to his home country, the shop workers who can go home at night, but are fated to return again the next morning. All of this takes place rather ironically in an airport, which is usually associated with going places, and in point of fact none of the characters are really going anywhere. Damn, we're back to Sartre and "No Exit", aren't we?
But, there are lots of things that Viktor can do to pass the time while waiting for his homeland to elect a new government - he works his way into the society of the airport terminal, doing odd jobs, returning luggage carts for change (I never figured out why those damn carts are a thing - doesn't everyone's luggage have wheels?) and playing matchmaker for the baggage handlers. He also manages to get some construction work - you'd think a construction foreman would need to see someone's green card or social security card, but I guess it truly is a lawless between-countries society after all.
There's a bit here about collecting - and that's an obsession that I understand. Being a collector of both comic books and Star Wars autographs, I know how terrible it is to have a gap in a collection, and the lengths someone (me) will go to in order to fill it. If I'm missing one comic in a series, forget about it, I can't sleep until I find it in a store or order it from eBay. The autographs are a separate obsession, I grew the collection over 10 years of going to San Diego Comic-Con when I noticed the actors kept appearing there. The first year I got Kenny "R2D2" Baker's autograph, and then the next year I got three - Peter Mayhew, Ray Park, and Jake Lloyd. And after the year I met Mark Hamill AND Billy Dee Williams, forget it, I was hooked. Some I've bought online from reputable dealers (with COA's) but the most memorable ones came from meeting the actors in person. But I digress...
This film is loosely based on a true story - a man named Mehran Karimi Nasseri managed to live in the Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris for 17 years, from 1988 to 2006. He was expelled from Iran, and claimed to have one British parent, so he flew to the U.K. but lost his papers along the way, so the U.K. sent him back to France. Aha! So it's not the U.S. immigration laws we have to fix - it's the French courts that determined that he couldn't enter France, but he also couldn't be expelled from the airport.
Also starring Tom Hanks (last seen in "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"), Catherine Zeta-Jones (last seen in "Rock of Ages"), Chi McBride (last seen in "Mercury Rising"), Diego Luna (last seen in "Milk"), Zoe Saldana (last seen in "Star Trek Into Darkness"), Barry Shabaka Henley (last seen in "Collateral"), Kumar Pallana, with cameos from Michael Nouri, Scott Adsit, and Dan Finnerty.
RATING: 5 out of 10 saltine crackers
No comments:
Post a Comment