Unless you’ve been stranded on a desert island for the last six years, you’ve likely seen the last collaboration between director Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks, 1994’s Forrest Gump. Currently the eighth-highest grossing film of all time, it boosted Hanks to the uppermost echelon of superstardom, and confirmed Zemeckis’s Spielberg-in-waiting status. Is it any wonder that they’d want to work together again?
Like Gump, Cast Away is essentially a one-man showcase for Hanks. Playing Chuck Noland, a FedEx operations manager who washes up on a remote South Pacific island after a plane crash, he delivers a performance that ought to bring him a third Best Actor statuette. It’s often too easy to take Hanks’s brilliance for granted (his Oscar loss for Saving Private Ryan is an arguable example), and Cast Away plays to his specialty of portraying ordinary guys in extraordinary circumstances. But the film relies so completely on that brilliance that it’s impossible to overlook. For much of the film, Hanks is alone on screen without the benefit of a musical score or appreciable dialogue. What dialogue there is is actually monologue, in the form of Noland’s conversations with a volleyball he finds among the flotsam from the crash. Hanks even becomes the film’s best special effect, as his character’s initial middle-class paunch gives way to the lean wiriness of a primitive hunter (the startling transformation was achieved not by Zemeckis’s usual technical gimcrackery, but by an extended break in filming while Hanks dieted and the director shot What Lies Beneath.) The only comparable performance this year, male or female, is that of Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich.
If audiences love the desert-island saga because it represents the ultimate test of character, ingenuity, and plain old survival instinct (witness the popularity of TV’s Survivor), writers love it because it’s so handy to hang themes on. On one level, Cast Away has a clever Twilight Zone-ish irony—a man whose life is all about mastering time finds himself with all the time in the world… and nobody to spend it with. On another, supposedly deeper level, the main character learns to “keep on breathing” in life, because “you never know what the tide will bring.” As messages go, that sounds suspiciously like comparing life to a box of chocolates. Even at over two hours long, parts of the film are a bit glossed over and perfunctory—it feels like Robinson Crusoe for the cell phone generation—and the ending is delivered as predictably as a FedEx package.
Still, Cast Away makes those hours go by pleasantly, with humor that plays on desert-island clichés without belaboring them. People around me in the theater kept whispering to each other that they’d do this or that in Noland’s place, which is always a sign of pure involvement. Besides, you’ll come away with some helpful fire-making tips in case you ever do get stranded on a desert island.
(3/4)