Utterly engrossing

Rating: 10/10 (21 June 2004)

Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks have done it again. These two individually can almost completely ensure the success of a movie, and together, they are simply spectacular. This movie is touching and funny in all the right places. It is a tribute to the craftsmanship involved in making this movie that Catherine Zeta-Jones has to take backseat, but her acting was delicately understated.
There is no question that Tom Hanks is a fine actor, but he creates this character in such a believable way that the audience easily forgets that he is Tom Hanks, a face we all can recognize, and begins to see him as a foreign man. He gives us an intelligent and compassionate character that we can immediately sympathize with.
In such a character-driven movie, the protagonist is almost as important as the antagonist, and Stanley Tucci in the role of Frank Dixon hardly slouches there. Though his motivation is clear from the beginning and he never strays from a normal human character, I found myself whispering curses at the screen whenever he showed up to make Victor's (Tom Hanks) life just a little more difficult.
There are sweet moments, such as when the hard-nosed INS officer and the man who runs the food truck use Victor as a go-between in a blind love affair. There are heart-wrenching moments, like the very beginning when Victor sees news coverage all in English that tells of the war in his country and struggles to understand. All in all, a movie I would recommend to almost anyone able to see it.