Robert Zemeckis (2000)
When we noticed Cast Away was on television, Sally was keen to watch it and I thought it would be interesting to compare with All Is Lost, which I’d booked to see a few days later. I missed most of the first half hour, although it was clear enough from the bits I saw that the protagonist Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), a FedEx systems analyst, is a workaholic at the expense of his personal relationships and that Robert Zemeckis has long been a master réalisateur of the terrors of air travel. After seeing Cast Away, I read David Edelstein’s review at the time of its original release: Edelstein describes the air crash in the film as the most frighteningly convincing he’s seen on screen; I felt the same about the spectacularly bumpy plane ride that opens Zemeckis’s Flight (2012). Chuck Noland, the only survivor of the crash, apart from a collection of FedEx packages, floats on an inflatable life raft to the shores of a deserted island in the South Pacific and his solitary life there is the main part of Cast Away.
Because Zemeckis and the screenwriter William Broyles Jr have quickly demonstrated that Chuck Noland has got his work-life balance priorities wrong, it’s inevitable that Tom Hanks must survive to learn his lesson. The certainty of this is a dramatic limitation: Chuck’s Robinson Crusoe experience can involve you only as a series of exciting and/or gruelling incidents and ordeals; besides, you wouldn’t expect a commercial filmmaker – especially one whose speciality is action sequences – to give much screen time to terror and boredom (and the terror of boredom) that must dominate a human mind in the circumstances in which Chuck Noland finds himself. But Zemeckis and Broyles, exploiting the hazardous possibilities of land and sea – and with the help of DoP Don Burgess and editor Arthur Schmidt, as well as Hanks – do succeed in making Chuck’s survivalist rites of passage involving. Tom Hanks is an essentially sociable actor (the antithesis of All Is Lost’s star Robert Redford) and Chuck’s interactions on the island with an anthropomorphised Wilson football (contained in one of the FedEx parcels) are especially good because you feel that Hanks, as much as Chuck, needs the company. He paints a face on the football, calls it Wilson and talks to it. It’s a fine moment when Chuck throws the ball from a clifftop in anger then, overcome by fear and remorse, retrieves it and begs forgiveness. Hanks is affecting as he lugs the aircraft’s pilot, whose corpse floats in, onto dry land and buries the man. His humour also comes into play when Chuck first succeeds in making fire and does a celebratory dance.
Chuck Noland is stuck on the island for a long time; when the action moves to ‘four years later’, Hanks appears in a loincloth and with a mass of greying hair of dreadlocked involvement. He’s also thinner, of course, although I found the emaciation more worrying when Chuck eventually returned to civilisation and was fully dressed. Hanks gained weight to play the pre-Crusoe Chuck then lost even more after the first part of the desert island sequences had been shot. Production was suspended by a year to allow him to do so (and Zemeckis to make What Lies Beneath). It’s one thing for an actor to gain or lose weight to play a part; Hanks’s weight fluctuation within the film means that you can’t fail to remain aware of what the actor has done here in order to be ‘real’. This has a somewhat distancing effect.
The final part of Cast Away is bad. What has happened to Chuck is so extraordinary that you want to see more of how he resumes functioning at all in a world of people, of changing sights and sounds. Instead, the focus is on Chuck’s relationship with his girlfriend Kelly (Helen Hunt) – although without reference to the previous tensions between them. Chuck seems to have returned to life in a circumscribed screen world: Zemeckis and Broyles move from one movie challenge (how to survive in spectacularly adverse circumstances) to another (how to get back the girl you lost). Kelly, having given Chuck up for dead, has married an excessively boring dentist (Chris Noth) and had a child. Although they declare their undying love for each other in a rainstorm, Chuck and Kelly realise it’s too late to start again. Zemeckis has rationed the pompously soppy music by Alan Silvestri but, by now, there’s still been too much of it. The crappy final sequences see Chuck deliver the one FedEx package he left unopened to the address of its sender (with ‘Return to Sender’ playing on his car radio as he does so). There’s no one at home so he leaves the package with a note of thanks for saving his life. As he’s heading off, he gets directions from a friendly, pretty woman (Lari White) (‘You look lost!’). He then stands at a crossroads, facing the camera with a which-way-will-life-take-me expression[1].
29 December 2013
[1] To be fair to Robert Zemeckis, I didn’t fully get the ending – if the Wikipedia plot synopsis is to be believed: ‘[Chuck] … stops at a remote crossroads. A woman passing by in a pickup truck stops to explain where each road leads. As she drives away, Chuck notices the illustration on her truck is identical to the one on the parcel. Chuck is left looking down each road and then toward the departing woman in the truck’. But I don’t think a full understanding of this finale makes it any better.
