DIRECTOR
Robert Zemeckis
SCREENWRITER
William Broyles Jr.
PRODUCERS
Tom Hanks
Jack Rapke
Steve Starkey
Robert Zemeckis
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Don Burgess
MUSIC
Alan Silvestri
EDITOR
Arthur Schmidt
CAST
Tom Hanks (Chuck Noland)
Helen Hunt (Kelly Frears)
Nick Searcy (Stan)
Chris Noth (Jerry Lovett)
Lari White (Bettina Peterson)
Geoffrey Blake (Maynard Graham)
Jenifer Lewis (Becca Twig)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 143m
U.S. release: December 22, 2000
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official site
Other Robert
Zemeckis films
reviewed on this site:
- Contact
- Forrest
Gump
- What
Lies Beneath
|
Robert
Zemeckis, the mainstream-populist visionary who made Forrest
Gump and Contact
(as well as last summer's thriller What
Lies Beneath), is an extremely accomplished director;
his problem these days is that he tries too hard to accomplish
a masterpiece every time out. Zemeckis wants to make films for
the ages, fables that speak to us about us, about the mysteries
of the universe. How he graduated from the pop prankster who
made Used Cars, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Back
to the Future to the pop shaman who has now made Cast
Away is itself one of life's great mysteries. (Maybe Zemeckis
will make a movie about it.)
Tom Hanks, chubby and waddling fast in a winter parka, is Chuck
Noland, an efficiency guru who troubleshoots FedEx operations
around the world, his voice rising in contempt at the workers'
slowness. Don't they know they're FedEx? Let's go,
people! Hanks embodies the sort of modern man for whom every
job situation assumes the wired priority of a sucking chest wound;
he plays ER in his head, and his personal life gets put in triage.
He has little or no time for his girlfriend Kelly (Helen Hunt);
rather glumly, they exchange Christmas gifts in his van before
Chuck takes off on a flight to shepherd yet another vitally important
shipment.
The little plane, as we all know, goes down over the ocean, and
the sequence is one of the most wrenching bits of crisis ever
filmed. It hits fast and hard, with no warning; even though we
know it's coming, we don't feel ready for it -- we're
thrown into it as rudely and abruptly as Chuck is. Zemeckis uses
the technological effects at his disposal to give us each nightmarish
detail of the experience right up to the impact. Afterward, when
Chuck washes up on a godforsaken rocky island, the director abandons
technology but still focuses on the details of Chuck's survival.
Even here, Chuck is a problem-solver; he uses bits of salvaged
goodies to make tools, shelter, even a friend named Wilson (a
volleyball with a face rendered in blood -- a creation saved
from too-cuteness by its slight Lord of the Flies aura).
To be honest, the gruelling study of Chuck's ordeal -- it spans
over four years -- wore out its welcome for me after about half
an hour. The built-in problem with movies like this is that you're
stuck out in nowhere along with the character(s); you can't wait
to get home. It needs to be said, though, that Zemeckis' tranquil
control never wavers, and that Hanks takes whatever starch he
can out of the primal-man conception. Even when he's swathed
in more beard than the two bearded guys in ZZ Top put together,
Hanks comes across as a sane if ornery modern man, even as he's
carrying on animated chats with his volleyball -- we accept it
as any person's natural hunger to connect with someone.
And he never loses his humor.
Zemeckis and writer William Broyles, Jr. have been planting a
few hints, though, and toward the end, after Chuck has returned
home, we hear about something that almost happened on the island
during those four (offscreen) years. Chuck becomes a figure of
endurance, a real chicken-soup-for-the-soul story, and the movie
closes up shop about 20 minutes before it ends. Hanks has a remarkable
intense, haunted look -- it isn't just his weight loss, though
there seem to be new planes and contours to his face -- but we
never understand how it feels to be back among people
who take trivial things seriously after you've been spearing
fish and talking to a gory volleyball for the length of a presidential
term. (It doesn't help that Broyles' script contains several
glaring set-ups at the beginning that will predictably "pay
off" later: a bad tooth, the ailing wife of a co-worker,
etc.)
Chuck goes to see Kelly, whose photo kept him alive all that
time, but Helen Hunt can't work up much energy for the occasion;
maybe she was dispirited by how few scenes she has. She could
play the kind of woman a man would risk death to get back to,
but she doesn't here, and the awkwardness of their late scenes
together feels less like realism than like a casting mismatch.
Alan Silvestri's score, which sounds like an unfinished piece
of music (most of the movie has none), whines on cue to lock
in on Chuck's pangs of loss. It whines, with a glimmer of hope,
when Chuck imparts the moral of the fable: that you have to keep
breathing, keep living. The movie takes too long to deliver
us this banal package of wisdom, and we know what it is before
we open it: a box of chocolates. Tom Hanks' performance held
me, but as written Cast Away is about the great mystery
of the human will to survive -- and, incidentally, about the
great mystery of the mass audience's will to accept pablum. |
