CAST AWAY
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: Tom Hanks plays a FedEx executive
marooned on a deserted island who must find the
means to stay alive and sane. Much of the film
is enthralling but director Robert Zemeckis
spends too much time on the aspects of lessor
interest and not enough time on the parts that
are really most enthralling. The film builds to
a platitude by rushing past some of the most
intellectually engaging material. With more
emphasis on the real meat, this film would have
rated considerably higher. Rating: 6 (0 to 10),
high +1 (-4 to +4)
Chuck Noland (played by the versatile Tom Hanks) is a very dedicated executive for Federal Express, the package delivery company. He is extremely systematic and obsessed with the passage of time. Chuck has become a local legend for his dedication to delivering packages on time. He is even the center of a Federal Express urban myth about the lengths he will go to get a package delivered on time. Chuck knows that in his business time is all important for him, but unknown to him, he is about to spend the next few years of his life in a place where time is far more subjective.
Chuck is napping on a company flight over the Pacific and awakes to discover that the plane is off course in a storm and desperately trying to find its way back. Suddenly the world falls apart under him and we find ourselves in a crashing plane that is rapidly decompressing. After what well might be the scariest plane crash in cinema history Chuck finds himself in a life raft in a storm alone on a hostile ocean. With extreme good fortune he is blown to an island. But perhaps the island is not such good luck as he has no tools and no means to feed and protect himself. How he does that is the heart of the film. Unfortunately, there is not enough of this heart.
The problem is that the buildup to this point really takes too much time. The script shows you a bit of his relationship with his lover Kelly Frears (played by Helen Hunt). But once he is on the island that part of the film really is necessary only to establish that he has a woman whom he dearly loves. Developing that relationship takes valuable time from coverage of the island experience. The opening setup is not only unneeded, it is also puzzling. We are taken to a large family Christmas dinner at which everyone in the family seems to dress the same and work for Federal Express. That strikes the viewer as peculiar, but it leads to nothing. It not only wastes precious screentime, it does nothing to enhance the story. What it does serve to do is give Federal Express an even larger product placement than the huge one they would already have.
The centerpiece of this film is the air crash which is as detailed as it is frightening. One might almost say it was done in the realistic style of the beach landing of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and may be nearly as harrowing. It packs quite an impact and I will certainly think of its images the next time that I fly. Trust me, you should not expect to see this film as an airline in-flight movie.
This in many ways is an engineer's film. With a set of modest tools washed up on the shore from the crash or available on the island he is forced to reinvent or discover ways to fulfill his needs. He must reinterpret objects from a few floating FedEx packages as the tools to build his small world. And the knowledge of how to do that does not come easily. In the beginning he is almost a laughable character, strange-looking and overweight, and he makes foolish and frustrating mistakes. And he pays for those mistakes in pain and blood. What seem like very small tasks in civilization become extremely hard.
As time goes by, Chuck's intelligence as well as his fitness seems to improve immensely, though not his sanity. I think that the most interesting point made by the film is that sanity may be really a social affectation. Many people let down their guard when they are alone and do things like talking to themselves that they would not do in front of others. Chuck's circumstances are more extreme and he goes a lot further. To save the greater part of his reason must sacrifice the lessor part. Chuck allows his sanity fall away and to be replaced by a benign and natural insanity. He invents a friend to talk with. In order to battle the solitude he even comes to love the friend. But he can only do this because he is alone. If he knew anyone was watching him he would be inhibited from creating such a friend. Yet his actions seem natural. Perhaps we are all at least partly insane and keep that part in check while there is danger that other people may find out. And those others also keep their irrational sides hidden. While this phenomenon is usually interpreted as the solitude driving him insane, it seems really to be a process of the privacy allowing him to drop his guard. He allows himself to be natural in ways that few other people in the world can.
This is a better story than the platitude that it seems to build up to in the final scene. But it was not all the film it could have been if Zemeckis would have realized where his best material lay. It rates a 6 on the 0 to 10 scale and a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. Wouldn't this be a good time for Luis Bunuel's 1952 ROBINSON CRUSOE to show up again and be rediscovered? I haven't seen it since I was five years old, but by all accounts it was quite good. Extra: look in this film for an emotionally charged scene that seems to be borrowed from MISSION TO MARS.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 2000 Mark R. Leeper
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