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When the hero of Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away returns to civilization after spending
four years marooned on a South Pacific island, he’s welcomed back in a homecoming
staged by his employers. We glimpse but a second of the ceremony, and even that we see
only through a videotape that’s being played in an empty office. The movie has more
important things on its mind right then: the first reunion between Chuck Noland and his
former fiancee who, having given him up for dead, has married another man. The moment is
typical of the way the surprisingly low-key Cast
Away works: action that other films (including other Zemeckis films) would deliver
with great fanfare are here muttered out of one corner of the movie’s mouth.
Noland (Tom Hanks) is a systems
analyst for a worldwide express delivery service who’s trying to balance the demands
of his job against those of his relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Kelly (Helen
Hunt, in a small part). On the day after Christmas he’s called away on business, and
during the overseas flight his company’s courier jet encounters a storm that first
blows the plane off-course, then out of the sky altogether. Noland is the sole survivor,
and in his tiny life raft he washes up onto a meager nub of an island—a
claustrophobic strip of beach backed by a couple of rugged peaks and a jungle whose one
bounty is its coconut trees. When Noland picks up a couple of packages that followed him
from the wreckage and stands surveying his new home, the movie seems to be asking us,
“What would you do in his place?”
Part of Noland’s charm is
that he isn’t any smarter than we are: he knows no better way of making a fire than
rubbing two sticks together, and only by accident does he discover that it’s easier
to slice than beat a coconut open. Other packages from the plane wash ashore, and he finds
a use for most of their contents. (A pair of ice-skates comes in particularly handy.) He
doesn’t have a life on the island—there’s nowhere to go, nothing to
do—and for four long years he lives in a suspended state with only his yearning to
keep him company. But when the laws of probability finally give in and provide him with
the means to save himself, and he makes his way back to civilization—back to the
girlfriend, the job, the places he knew—he finds that leaving the island isn’t
the same thing as escaping it. Cast Away is at
its best in showing how irreversible the past is, how stained we are by our experiences,
and in Hanks’ and Zemeckis’ hands these changes aren’t treated as matters
of wistful contemplation. They’re shattering.
Robert Zemeckis’ change of
style in Cast Away is so close to miraculous
that the Vatican ought to be notified. For 20 years he’s specialized in hyperactive
entertainments that have the character and grace of a loudly-struck gong, but his Cast Away is a model of restrained storytelling
that’s studded with a series of pure emotional peaks. It’s content to slip its
details—a blinking light, say—into odd corners of the frame and let us notice
them when we will. Just before the crash, one of the jet’s crew members bashes his
head against a door jamb, and the action occurs in such a blur of activity that we want to
confirm that it happened—we’re aren’t used to mainstream films working this
deftly. Zemeckis finds some brilliant ways to make us feel the frailty and helplessness of
Noland’s situation, as when the camera gradually pulls backwards from his inflatable
life raft as it pitches about in the storm until it’s a mere leaf among the towering
waves.
Zemeckis and screenwriter William
Broyles keep the movie focused on Noland’s state of mind by slicing away everything
extraneous to his story. The plane crash and Noland’s rescue are both brisk affairs,
gotten through with a minimum of special effects or hyperbole. The island scenes are
played without any background music, and some of them have no more than a word or two of
dialogue, giving us the time and space to accept Noland’s grief and rage as our own.
In Broyles’ savvy script, Noland’s survival confuses and upsets the loved ones
who’ve written him out of their lives. In these scenes Cast Away protects its characters with touching
propriety, as in a devastating view of Hunt’s character that’s discreetly given
to us through a plate glass window.
Broyles and Zemeckis brave certain
ridicule by paying so much attention to a Wilson volleyball that Noland finds in one of
the packages. After Noland accidentally bleeds on it, he impulsively draws a face in the
blood that gives the ball a homely personality, and by degrees “Wilson” becomes
his surrogate companion, until man and object are bonded in an emotionally detailed
relationship that would be deranged in any other context. We form neurotic attachments to
inanimate objects even in normal times, but “Wilson” is the invention of a mind
that’s steeped in loneliness. Noland’s interactions with the ball most obviously
recall Warren Oates talking to the lifeless head in Bring Me the Head of
Alfredo Garcia, but they also bring to mind Robert De Niro’s one-sided
conversations with the celebrity cardboard cutouts in The King of Comedy.
It’s hard to face such dismal expressions of loneliness because they make us feel
like social spastics; we’re quick to dismiss them as ludicrous because they’d
otherwise fill us with shame. They’re usually glossed over when they do appear in movies (as in the tug of kinship that
Billy Crudup feels for a damaged flower at the end of his acid trip in Almost
Famous), but Cast Away puts
“Wilson” at the center of its action.
Cast Away is so intelligent for most of its running
time that the obviousness of its missteps are surprising. It opens with an aggressively
bad scene in which Noland is seen hectoring his employees about the importance of time
management, as if to prepare us for another yuppie-awakening flick. (Once he reaches the
island, Noland is an Everyman—he learns the same lessons that you or I would.) As if
to complete a pair of bookends, the movie’s closing scene is marred by a character
who is meant to represent the moist and effervescent promise of life, yet whose vulgarity
is jarring in a story full of muted emotions. One wishes that the middle-brow pun built
into Noland’s name didn’t exist, and despite Zemeckis’ general
hard-headedness, he underscores the poignancy of a couple of late sequences with some
gooey string music. And while product placements are probably an irreversible fact of
life, Cast Away is cheapened by having a
real-life delivery service’s logo thrust before the camera in so many scenes. Would
it have been so hard to invent a fictitious company?
When the jet
pilot’s dead body washes ashore, Noland rummages through the man’s pockets and
then buries him, and standing over the finished grave he thinks a minute before realizing
there’s nothing to say beyond, “So—that’s it.” It’s a pure
Tom Hanks line, and Hanks delivers it with a perfect blend of respect and disappointment.
(The burial gave Noland something to do that day.) Hanks has appeared in so many earnest
movies that it’s easy to forget how diligent and affecting he can be as an actor; in
any case, this movie needs someone with his common touch because we spend so much time in
Noland’s company. Never less assuming than he is here, Hanks' Noland is a man abashed by his turn of
luck, as if he were Fate’s chump. The one time that his performance becomes animated
in a way that might be mistaken for a star’s showing off, it’s absolutely called
for by the moment—after all, Noland has just created fire.
Cast Away is a solid portrait
of a man who’s suddenly forced to see his life in terms of distances, both geographic
and emotional; it offers a convincing demonstration of how bitterness and optimism can
taint each other, even within the same person. You feel slowed-down and appreciative when
you come out of it; it puts you back on the street with a fresh pair of eyes.
- Tom Block
