Review: Cast Away (2000)
Director Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks, whose pairing on Forrest Gump scored a high flying home run during the 67th Academy Awards, teamed up again for a new effort, titled “Cast Away”. A bravura reworking of the “Robinson Crusoe” idea about a man stranded by himself for four years on a South Pacific island, completely uninhabited. Meticulous, sumptuous production design and striking visuals compensate for a lack of drama and momentum that stretched the narrative form to its limits.
“Cast Away” bears thematic resemblance to “Forrest Gump” the earlier Zemeckis-Hanks teaming, in its focus on the personal journey of an Every man. But the 1994 Oscar winner spanned decades and numerous locales, with its hero the only constant; however, the bulk of the new pic is confined to one setting and a much tighter time frame, depicting in detail the moral odyssey of one man. For Hanks, this is essentially a one man show and the legendary actor proves himself able. “Cast Away” was a brilliantly constructed and executed film, the kind of effort that deserves our utmost appreciation.
An appropriate movie to usher us into 2001 as its story of the evolution of man bears similarities with “Stanley”, 1968 Kubrick movie. Both track the growth of the human impulse in intense environment and invent tools and apparatus that further that end. Similarly to “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “Cast Away” is interested in the philosophical implications of the story as it is in mechanical. “Cast Away” is about triumph over adversity, but only in the roughest sense. It’s mournful and troubling in a way that goes beyond ordinary movie manipulation. It burns clean.
SPOILER ALERT!! [Don’t continue reading if you have not watched the film]
Hanks, who serves as a producer for this film, takes on a role of an ambitious FedEx systems engineer, whose life run with the precision of a luxury watch, shattered when his plane crashes and leaves him alone on a remote island. The narrative is divided into four asymmetrical parts. Set in 1995, the first segment establishes Chuck’s manic personal and professional lives. His rapid paced career takes him on a short notice, to far flung cities away from his beloved girl friend, Kelly. Returning home on a FedEx plane, Chuck couldn’t wait for Christmas Eve with his girl friend, but a mechanical problem on the plane causes a terrifying plunge into the ocean coupled with gritty realism. During the second part of the film, Chuck was forced to deal with the most basic of needs. Film plays well with the irony of a driven man, used to solving problems all his life, faced with the most important of all: sheer survival.
Cut to four years later. tale now finds Chuck trim and muscular, sporting long blond hair and a bushy beard and stripped to a Tarzan-like outfit. Having mastered the four basic needs, he begins to deal with his need for companionship. While his memories of Kelly are essential to Chuck’s survival, he also establishes an unusual relationship with “Wilson” a volleyball washed ashore inside a FedEx package from the doomed flight. Playing a crucial role, Wilson rescues Chuck from solitude as well as depression. This fellowship also allows Chuck to speak after an hour’s worth of mostly silence.
Driven forward by the strength and struggles of its hero, “Cast Away” takes admirable risks while avoiding pitfalls. Story stays close to the ground, literally, maintaining a coherent p.o.v., with Chuck the center of attention; there are no cuts to society’s or Kelly’s reaction to Chuck’s disaster. Fate gives Chuck a chance to fight his way back to civilization in a daring escape, only to face an unexpected emotional challenge that, in many ways, is more demanding than the physical ones he survived. Though there’s closure, the last segment deviates refreshingly from a conventional Hollywood ending.
The film revolves around a key question: Once you have learned to survive physically, how do you survive emotionally and spiritually? While Chuck opens the FedEx packages that have washed ashore, he decides not to open one that’s adorned with angel wings, which becomes a symbol of hope, one he holds onto even after his return. More problematic is the suggestion that if Chuck hadn’t lost everything, he would never have come to understand what’s truly important. It’s here that the film gets excessively academic and metaphysical. Ultimately, ‘Cast Away‘ is about realizing the true meaning of belonging, of finding home, casting away the clutter that complicates life in an effort to rediscover what matters. This issue comes into focus in the last reel. The helmer shows again his mastery of mise-en-scene: Chuck’s return to civilization is so brilliantly staged that it almost makes up for the unexciting spots at the center.
“Cast Away” also has its quotient of technological trickery, but one of the movie’s wonders is that everything looks and feels so remarkably real. And it never pushes us too hard. It also knows when to turn down the volume. The most devastating sequences, instead of flooding us with music, suspend the soundtrack and forgo even language to allow the sounds of nature to take over. All we hear from Mr. Hanks are the grunts and howls of a man exerting himself to stay alive against a backdrop of the roaring ocean and the wind eerily whistling outside the cave Chuck adopts as a shelter. Ultimate isolation, the movie reminds us, doesn’t have a soundtrack except what the environment churns up along with the ringing in our ears, our heartbeats and the voices chattering in our minds.
Mr. Hanks’s likability has everything to do with the ease with which he pours the childlike side of himself into his performances. Even at moments of maximum stress, the qualities that shine through are an infectious spontaneity, curiosity, ebullience and native optimism, along with an instinctive common-sense resourcefulness. The screenplay’s conceptual master stroke has Chuck revert to childhood through the creation of an imaginary companion so he can survive psychically.
Hanks might have taken the easy way out and played this lost man as a blank, a character outside of ourselves to be observed from afar and pitied. Instead, he works the miracle of inviting us inside his troubled shell, where loneliness sounds like the rush of the sea, and feels like company. “Cast Away” leaves us hanging. But that final, lurking ambiguity is a small price to pay for the primal force of what has come before.
