Tom Hanks might be the last invincible box-office star – even people like Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson stumble from time to time, but Hanks, man, he got all that nastiness out of the way early on. Bachelor Party, Joe vs. the Volcano, Bonfire of the Vanities. He bounced back and had, commercially and critically, probably the best acting decade of any Hollywood staple. So he has the right, then, to go out on a limb and do a desert-island movie all by himself. Of course, he brings schlock director Robert Zemeckis and his female counterpart, Oscar everywoman Helen Hunt, with him, but for the bulk of Cast Away, you’re watching “The Tom Hanks Show.” The movie lives or dies by his performance alone.
And, for the most part, Cast Away is a success. It plays better than the batch of Christmas movies we were subjected to in 1998 and ’99 – Patch Adams, Galaxy Quest, Stepmom and Hanks’ own borefest, You’ve Got Mail – and it has its would-be epic range of plane crashes, romantic longing, progressive insanity and independent personal growth. But somehow I left the movie feeling like there wasn’t much to it, that Cast Away followed its own predictable arc without taking too many chances. And that the ending could have used some improvement.
The movie opens laden with irony – here’s Hanks, the goal-oriented, time-obsessed taskmaster for FedEx, a company that stands both for long-distance travel and the expeditious 24-hour cycle of modern life. He’s first seen overseeing some delivery problems in Russia, clutching to his pained tooth and readying himself for a trip home to see his girlfriend (Hunt, in dowdy mode as a harrowed doctoral candidate). After sitting through half a family Christmas dinner, Hanks is summoned via pager to Malaysia, and off he dashes to fix whatever sorting problem they have that they can’t fix on that side of the world.
Zemeckis, who helped fill the adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact with the scientist’s dual tenets of skepticism and wonder, finds exactly the right notes for Cast Away’s dramatic plane crash over the ocean. Hanks is sleeping on the FedEx plane when some turbulence jolts him back to consciousness – with only an uncertain couple minutes’ warning, he and the piloting team have to face their own mortality. And he’s the only one who pulls through it, as the crash footage gives way to an even more stunning post-crash sequence in the water that rivals Titanic and, even as a cinematic aside, manages to top all of The Perfect Storm.
The next day, Hanks wakes up on the island and – bang – our premise is realized. Desert-island movies are nothing new, of course, and this one has the unfortunate timing to come on the heels of “Survivor,” but Cast Away distinguishes itself from the rest. Hanks is there by himself, which means there are long stretches with no dialogue. The movie’s quietness works for it in a way that extended narration (“Day Four. I’m still on the island, and it still sucks.”) and a dramatic score would have killed. No, it’s just one guy on an island, in the middle of nowhere, slowly and convincingly having to adapt to the reality he’s found himself in. And having to deal with the fact that his time-regimented world and job and girlfriend wrapped in a tidy bow mean absolutely nothing at this point.
Hanks is, not surprisingly, perfect for the part. Casting a stronger man would have led to an action-hero effect, while casting an older or weaker man would have tossed all believability out the window. In Cast Away, Hanks looks like hell when he reaches the island and only gets worse. By the time the “four years later” card has popped up, he’s a ghastly shadow of his former self, rail-thin and mountain-man scraggly. And the delirium that sets in when he befriends a washed-ashore Wilson volleyball seems perfectly natural.
So what causes my reservations about this movie? I think the fact that its psychological implications can only be hinted at in this type of format – the idea of a man stuck on an island by himself is more suited to print. You can get in the guy’s head and really chart his despair and fear that way. With Cast Away structured the way it is, some of it seems understated and other stuff glossed over, while the opening and closing sequences away from the island seem to go on a lot longer than they rightfully should. The movie is almost 150 minutes long, but you really don’t get the sense that the Hanks character spent such a significant chunk of his life on that island.
But it’s worth watching, Cast Away, and it will make you think. This time of year, when we take our comfortable families and homes and jobs and possessions for granted, it never hurts to be reminded that a random twist of fate could leave us isolated from all of the above. Cast Away is only marginally a “Christmas” movie, but its themes and moral structure have It’s a Wonderful Life written all over them.
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