Cast Away

recommended

by Sam Adams

"We never allow ourselves the sin of losing track of time," lectures Cast Away’s Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), a Federal Express trainer teaching the finer points of overnight delivery to a ramshackle bunch of Moscow mail-sorters. A stone’s throw from Lenin’s tomb, he calls his girlfriend back home in Memphis, connected in a matter of seconds to a person halfway around the world. Trouble is, she’s not home.

Cast Away is heavy, sometimes leaden, with such ironies. Though the film opens in 1995, when e-mail was still a novelty and cell phones weighed more than a can of soda, it’s still a world where Chuck and his doctoral-candidate girlfriend Kelly (Helen Hunt) have to conference day-planner-to-day-planner in order to plan out their holidays, and where the most jovial of family dinners can be disrupted by the plaintive call of the North American pager. When Chuck’s called suddenly to Malaysia — he and Kelly exchange Christmas presents in the car, including his gift of what looks like an engagement ring — he calls out to her from the runway: "I’ll be right back."

As nearly every viewer of Cast Away will know, Chuck couldn’t be more wrong: He’s about to endure a plane crash that will leave him stranded on a tiny island for more than four years. The irony of his chipper farewell is killing but cheap, but there’s more to his brisk wave than the audience’s smug foreknowledge. While Cast Away isn’t one of those movies where the hero is punished for his hubris or learns some vital life lesson from his otherwise grueling ordeal, it trades on the fact that we’ve become accustomed to instant results; the idea that you could go to Malaysia and be "right back" is, if a slight exaggeration, certainly not inconceivable to the modern mind. Cast Away isn’t a morality tale so much as it is a what if…? What if you had nothing but time?

In the high-stakes craps game of Hollywood blockbusters, it’s too easy to focus on the element of risk, as if that automatically increases a movie’s worth. So yes, Tom Hanks did pack on weight for the role, and yes, production was shut down for a year while Hanks lost weight, grew a beard and spent lots of time under the sun lamp. (Director Robert Zemeckis made What Lies Beneath in the interim, using the same crew for both movies.) More dramatically — and more relevantly — Cast Away goes nearly an hour and a half without a single line spoken by anyone other than Hanks, a legitimately stunning gamble for a production of such scope.

Of course, none of that matters, even if it’s impossible to completely scour such information from your mind while you’re watching the movie. Hanks is hardly the first actor to gain and shed weight for a role, and Zemeckis is not the first to shut down and recommence production on a film. (He’s not even the first to do it intentionally.) It’s absurd to think that Cast Away was made without regard for box office potential, but it’s clear that all involved are gambling on the audience’s willingness to feel like they’re part of something different, that mainstream audiences will flock to it for the same reasons art-house patrons queue up for the new Lars von Trier.

Hanks isn’t an actor of prodigious talents, and I can’t help but express my admiration for his performance here in a negative fashion: No matter how long you have nothing to look at but Tom Hanks, you never get bored. There’s one unpleasant moment where, after spending days divining how to make a fire, Hanks dances around his newly-created blaze and whoops "I have discovered fire!" in a way that sounds uncomfortably like "There’s no crying in baseball!" But mainly Hanks plays Chuck Noland with ineffable simplicity, as an ordinary guy with a busy life who’s plunged into a situation where the boundaries of his existence no longer make sense. As distracting as it is to see the giant FedEx logos roll across the screen in the movie’s first act — it’s impossible not to think product placement — the decision to have Chuck work for a real-life company pays off when packages from the mangled plane start washing up on Chuck’s beach. The familiar orange and blue logo seems almost surreal when placed among Chuck’s deflated life raft and makeshift tools. (Chuck even arranges the packages into piles at first, as if he’s sorting them for distribution.) In this new context, the idea of doing anything at all overnight is no better than absurdity, and the motto "The World On Time" seems like a cosmic elbow in the ribs.

As successful a piece of storytelling as it is, though, Cast Away doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of insight. The best proof of this is the film’s muddled, disjointed conclusion, which goes through several fits and starts. More than once, you’re sure the credits are about to roll before we shift to yet another coda. Zemeckis reportedly lopped off an upbeat conclusion in postproduction, opting for a more open-ended finish, and shots were being added to the film as late as Thanksgiving, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Cast Away seems like it wants to go in a dozen directions at once. We all know the feeling of being bombarded by information, and never having enough time for the things that really matter — or even enough time to figure out what they might be. But Cast Away doesn’t do enough to get beyond depicting that condition, and start speculating about what it might mean. Too often, it seems that Hollywood scribes, like Cast Away’s William Broyles, Jr., have so little idea how to end a movie in a way that doesn’t offer trite resolution that their only other option is a rather sophomoric indecisiveness. (Hollywood’s version of an art film is a conventional film with the ending lopped off.) It’s a shame that Cast Away can’t come up with more to say, but it might provoke the beginnings of the conversation to which it fails to contribute.

Click here to see the trailer!