Cast Away
The Wrong Side of Memphis
The amazing thing about Cast Away is that it manages to be profound about something. Most Hollywood movies wouldn’t know profound if it hit them in the mouth with the business end of an ice skate, and those that are trying to say something profound generally end up tongue-tied.
Even Cast Away isn’t really profound in the way you might think. It appears from the outset that the movie wants to say something profound about time. Tom Hanks’s Robinson Crusoe character could have been anyone, doing anything; the movie wouldn’t have been that much different if Hanks had played a minor league baseball manager or an astronaut or an infantry captain, or even an ex-fireman with a “brain cloud”. Instead, Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a troubleshooter with Federal Express. The choice was deliberate; FedEx a perfect symbol for our fast-paced hurry-up world. (Although, the product placement is so pervasive that one wonders why the movie didn’t bill itself as “Cast Away, Presented by FedEx”, and have done with it, just as though the movie were the Orange Bowl or something.)
Noland himself is presented as the poster boy for what my main man Bob Greene called “The Twitching of America”, the modern habit of living life in overdrive. When Noland isn’t chewing out overseas FedEx employees about the need to speed up deliveries, he’s shuffling through his Day-Timer trying to juggle his schedule, or talking on his cell phone. (The first part of the movie is set in 1995, so he doesn’t have a Palm Pilot yet.) When a harrowing plane crash in the South Pacific casts him adrift on a desert island, a world away from Memphis, Noland is separated all that gave his life meaning; time, technology and love.
However, the most profound thing that Cast Away has to say about time isn’t even in the movie. Although the desert island scenes are slow, thoughtful, and almost silent, they seem too compressed, almost too fast-paced. Cast Away would have worked much, much better as a four-night, eight-hour TV miniseries than it does as a two-hour movie. (This review will be paused for one minute so that our younger readers can look up “eight-hour miniseries” on their laptops.) The thing is impossible, of course; the eight-hour miniseries has gone the way of the passenger pigeon. America doesn’t have the time to watch anymore.
Whether modern audiences could stand watching Tom Hanks struggle to survive on a lonely island for eight hours, I am not sure. I am sure, though, that if any actor could even attempt such a thing, it would be Tom Hanks. Hanks does his customarily great, Oscar-worthy job in what is essentially a double role; the Chuck Noland at the first of the movie bears so little resemblance to the tough, hardened castaway that it’s hard to believe it’s the same character. (Helen Hunt is also in this movie, but the only thing interesting about her limited screen time is that her Tennessee accent is as dodgy as her Texas accent in Dr. T and the Women.)
The other “character” in the movie that’s received a lot of critical attention is — of all things — a volleyball that Hanks whimsically calls “Wilson”. It is very easy for critics to make cheap fun of the seemingly endless scenes where Hanks argues with Wilson, or Hanks’s acting in the scenes where his character is separated from Wilson. However, anyone who would make such criticisms needs to read (as I did recently) Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, which imagines a world where souls reside outside the body as animal daemons. Wilson is best understood as Hanks’s daemon, and that understanding gives a powerful resonance to their scenes together.
Cast Away is well-acted, well-shot, and does as good a job as any movie could about showing the reality of a desert island existence. (Not to mention the excellent work on the plane crash scene; don’t expect to see Cast Away on airplanes anytime soon.) However, it isn’t as profound as it thinks it is, at least not most of the way through.
It may seem as though every scene in the movie was on the trailers; certainly they gave enough away of the movie. But there’s one scene that didn’t make the trailers, and it’s worth seeing. It occurs in the aftermath of Hanks’s desert island experience, that makes Cast Away a standout movie. It’s a quiet scene that explains some of what Hanks was thinking on the island, and it manages to say something profound about hope. And after the bad movie year we’ve had, there’s no better way to start a new year than to focus on hope.
P.S. For those of you who care about such things, Tom Hanks does urinate on camera in this movie, just as he did in The Green Mile and Apollo 13 and a couple of other movies which I’ve forgotten about. Also, Helen Hunt does get her blouse all wet, the way she did in As Good As It Gets and the aforementioned Dr. T. I know you’ll sleep better tonight knowing that.