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Cast Away (2000) NYT Critics' Pick

FILM REVIEW; Ultimate Survivor, Man Against Nature

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: December 22, 2000

WHICH of us, while sitting at the edge of the ocean and gazing toward the horizon, hasn't shivered to

imagine being drawn out to sea, getting lost and ending up a tiny forgotten speck in the middle of

nowhere, shouting at the sky? As potentially panic-inducing as this vision may be, there's also something

alluring about it. It's like standing on the edge of a cliff and imagining that fatal leap into the unknown.

And in the heart-stopping ocean and desert-island scenes that constitute the core of ''Cast Away,'' Tom

Hanks, in collaboration with the director Robert Zemeckis and the screenwriter William Broyles Jr., bring

those visions thrillingly and hauntingly to life.

With a bravura mastery of tone and timing, ''Cast Away'' sweeps us out to sea and washes us ashore on

a tiny deserted island in the Pacific. We remain stranded there just long enough to be given a deep, salty

gulp of what it's like to have to restart civilization from scratch. Just in time for dinner, however, we're

whisked back to safety and to tables piled high with supermarket goodies and a life that oddly and sadly

seems banal and superfluous compared to what has gone before.

When ''Cast Away'' is the farthest from civilization, it is as compelling a cinematic adventure as any

Hollywood has produced. Back on the mainland, however, it turns more formulaic and corny. But even

in the wobbly narrative bookends that hold a love story, interrupted by disaster, there are flashes of a

deeper metaphysical poignancy. At its best, ''Cast Away,'' like ''Titanic,'' awes us with its sheer oceanic

sweep and its cosmic apprehension of human insignificance.

The center of the film is an unforgettably gripping, heart-in-your-throat evocation of the unbearable

loneliness and terror of ultimate abandonment once its hero, stranded and presumed dead, gives up

hope of being rescued but still clings tenaciously to life.

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In one of the script's pointed paradoxes, this modern-day Robinson Crusoe, Chuck Noland (Mr. Hanks),

is a voluble, time-obsessed efficiency expert for Federal Express. Shortly before boarding a plane that

plunges him into the Pacific, he and his girlfriend, Kelly (Helen Hunt), exchange gifts: an engagement ring

from Chuck, her grandfather's pocket watch (with her picture inside) from Kelly. Marooned with only

the timepiece to remind him of home, Chuck finds himself facing only one deadline, the race to survive

in the face of starvation, dehydration and natural disaster.

''Cast Away'' is everything this year's other man-against-nature blockbuster, ''The Perfect Storm,'' was

not. The earlier film huffed and puffed to evoke a similarly elemental struggle in the traditional

Hollywood ways, with strenuously grandiose music and oversize, patently unrealistic computer-

generated special effects. ''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.

Once again, Mr. Hanks portrays a spirited Everyman, at once deeply likable and profoundly ordinary. If

his wound-up, globe-trotting character, who early in the film is shown haranguing Russian employees at

a FedEx depot in Moscow, isn't exactly like you and me in his background and tastes (he happens to be

an Elvis Presley fanatic), he embodies enough parts of other people to be utterly recognizable.

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. Painting a face (in his own blood) on a white Wilson

volleyball extracted from a FedEx package that washes up on shore, he turns Wilson (as he calls the ball)

into a fellow survivor, confidant and collaborator in an escape plan. Anyone who recalls being a very

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young child and clutching a doll that embodies comfort and companionship in times of loneliness and

insecurity will relate to the wrenching scenes in which Chuck clings to Wilson for emotional support.

The volleyball is one of many practical uses Chuck is able to make from the washed-up items (many of

them Christmas presents) in FedEx packages that at first seem useless but become essential survival

tools. A pair of figure skates becomes both a knife and a tool for removing an infected tooth in an

excruciating scene of do-it-yourself dentistry. Videotapes become ropes for an escape raft, and the

netting in a fancy dress a fishing net.

''Cast Away'' doesn't begin working its spell until its introductory scenes of its harried hero and his

fiancee are out of the way. But once Chuck is aboard a FedEx plane flying over the Pacific, an escalating

sense of dread takes over as the aircraft gives a warning shudder.

What follows is the scariest, most believable plane crash ever filmed as the aircraft begins splitting

apart and plummets in a whirling, vertiginous roar amid a violent thunderstorm. It is so real you can

almost feel the metal body of the aircraft shaking violently as it is wrenched apart. Crashing into the

ocean, Chuck is plunged underwater, his life-preserver narrowly avoiding puncture by a shard on which

it is momentarily caught. Rising to the surface, he finds himself surrounded by pieces of the burning

aircraft illuminating utter blackness in a furious storm.

Once Chuck, close to exhaustion, has drifted onto the shore of a tiny tropical island, the movie makes

each lesson in survival -- from pounding open a coconut to building a fire from scratch to a first

frustrated attempt at an escape -- an agonizing, often bloody, sometimes life-threatening ritual. The

world in which he finds himself, a pristine island amid a turquoise sea, is as dazzlingly beautiful as it is

treacherous.

Finally, after a certain point, the movie fades out and a title informs that four years have passed. In the

intervening years, Chuck has metamorphosed into a gaunt, shaggy, nut-brown survivalist, camped in a

lair embellished with his own cave drawings. Mr. Hanks lost more than 50 pounds for this section of thefilm (Mr. Zemeckis completed ''What Lies Beneath'' in the interim), and the actor's physical

transformation is as startling (and dramatically effective) as the fattened-up Robert De Niro in the later

scenes of ''Raging Bull.''

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Ultimately ''Cast Away'' has to end somewhere. And because it's a Hollywood movie with an attenuated

love story it needs to resolve, it couldn't disintegrate into nothingness. Once Chuck is saved, he appears

terminally detached and wears the faraway expression of a man whose traumatic experience has

separated him from others. For the rest of his life, we sense, an essential part of him will still be living

alone on that island.

At the same time, Mr. Hanks radiates the inappropriately sleek glow of someone who has just returned

from a luxury spa. And though his scenes with Ms. Hunt are well acted (the two really are perfectly

matched as a decent Mr. and Ms. American Everyperson), the suds are too thick to be washed away.

But in these later scenes, the movie also plays with metaphysical uncertainty in effective, recurrent

images of an actual crossroads. Because the conflict between romantic convention and the movie's

angst is never resolved, ''Cast Away'' leaves us hanging. But that final, lurking ambiguity is a small priceto pay for the primal force of what has come before.

''Cast Away'' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some strong language.

CAST AWAY

Directed by Robert Zemeckis; written by William Broyles Jr.; director of photography, Don Burgess;

edited by Arthur Schmidt; music by Alan Silvestri; production designer, Rick Carter; produced by Steve

Starkey, Tom Hanks, Mr. Zemeckis and Jack Rapke; released by 20th Century Fox and DreamWorks

Pictures. Running time: 143 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.

WITH: Tom Hanks (Chuck Noland), Helen Hunt (Kelly Frears), Nick Searcy (Stan), Chris Noth (Jerry Lovett)

and Lari White (Bettina Peterson).

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This movie was a powerful and moving story. It showed how the human spirit can overcome all odds to

achieve its deapest desire, in this case to get home. It was a very well made movie and I enjoyed

watching it.

Awards

Complete List of Awards

Win

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama - Tom Hanks - 2000 Hollywood Foreign Press

Association

Best Actor - Tom Hanks - 2000 New York Film Critics Circle

Best Actor - Tom Hanks - 2000 Chicago Film Critics Association

Nomination

Best Actor - Tom Hanks - 2000 British Academy of Film and Television Arts

Best Actor - Tom Hanks - 2000 Screen Actors Guild

Complete List

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While finding many scenes of Cast Away to be fascinating, I must say that as a whole I was less than

impressed with the end result. Tom Hanks (The Green Mile, Saving Private Ryan) gives an incredibly self-

sacrificing performance, and is by far the best thing going for this otherwise mundane story of a big-shot

FedEx exec whose plane crash lands in the ocean, and he ends up stranded on a deserted island. After

determining there is no way off the island, he makes a way of life for himself, always hoping someone

will eventually come rescue him.

There are some lessons to be learned from the themes of Cast Away, but the only real one Zemeckis

(What Lies Beneath, Back to the Future Part III) is striving for is of Time. Great emphasis is placed on

matters of time: FedEx wants everything to be delivered on time, Hanks places a timer in a package to

determine how long it took to be delivered, he is given a timepiece by his girlfriend, he measures the

time on the wall of the island cave, etc. The only thing it doesn't show is Tom Hanks taking the time to

appreciate the things that matter most, and of course, he soon realizes this when it's all taken away. It's

an important theme, but also one which is delivered in too ostentatious a fashion, so much so that

freeze frames and pointing arrows anytime an "important theme" prop occurred would not have made

it any more obvious. There are other themes, wings of hope, crossroads, and many other clichs

employed throughout, but these were also just as obvious.

While thematically I felt Cast Away to be uninteresting, I still feel compelled to recommend the film for

Tom Hanks' incredible performance. One great performance does not always a good film make, but

when the performance is 80% of the film, it's vital, and this is yet another Oscar-worthy role in an

already impressive career full of them. The acting is all the more impressive when you consider he must

make his every thought and action obvious to us without dialogue. There is a bit of a cheat when Hanksuses a volleyball (a present from one of the FedEx packages which wash up on the island with him) as a

surrogate friend in order to say the things which can't be readily seen with just body language alone, but

this at least is handled with emotional flair.

There are long stretches of time when not a lot is going on, showing us how Hanks opens a coconut,

starts a fire, and other things which most filmmakers would have skipped over thinking they are too

boring to showcase, yet somehow they rank among the most memorable scenes of the film. However,

they are also the longest scenes of the movie. When you realize the film spends more time in coconut

opening than in Hanks relationship with Helen Hunt (Pay It Forward, Dr. T and the Women), you see how

Cast Away needed a bit more shoring up in the thematic department if Zemeckis wanted to really drive

his points home, especially when you consider those scenes have little to do with what the film is really

supposed to be about.

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Cast Away is still a very interesting film, and will most likely keep most viewers' attentions riveted right

up to the very end, mostly because we are always anticipating something happening to make an

important point. Whether or not it makes this important point by the end of the film is arguable, but

from my point of view I felt something was definitely missing and, sad to say it, I believe this thing is

"The Point of it All".

As a tale of survival, it's an interesting and well-conceived parable, but in all other departments the

plotting and writing are rather anemic. The irony of the experience is that the less Hanks says, the more

the film seems to have something to say.