Cast Away, 2000. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Tom Hanks, Helen Hunt.

Synopsis: Chuck Noland lives his life on the clock. As a troubleshooter for FedEx, he knows that time is money. Chuck's life is hectic, but it's pretty good, too. He has friends, a girl he wants to marry, a future. He has a tooth that's going bad, but that can wait. On Christmas Eve, 1995, Chuck is paged by the company and packed on a plane to Malaysia. On the way, his plane crashes in the middle of the South Pacific, blown hundreds of miles off course by a storm. Chuck is the only survivor. He washes ashore on a tiny island. Some of the packages the plane was carrying wash ashore, too, and Chuck makes the best use of them he can as he struggles to survive long enough to be rescued. To pass the time, he paints a face in blood on a volleyball that washed ashore and names it Wilson ("I have a dentist named Spalding," he tells it). Four years later, Chuck is still on the island teetering on the brink of madness. Wilson the Volleyball has become real to him. One day, the remnants of a Port-A-Potty wash ashore. This is the last chance. Chuck constructs a raft and uses the Port-A-Potty as a sail in a desperate bid to escape his island prison. Miraculously, he makes it and must now contend with his rebirth into a world four years further on....

The Cat's Out of the Bag: I don't think I'm giving anything away in my synopsis when I reveal that Chuck, Tom Hanks's character, makes it off the island. The film's marketing campaign gives that away and more besides. "Why should one bother with the movie at all?" one could reasonably ask. Well, let me tell you....

Tour de Force: Tom Hanks stakes a large claim on a third Oscar in this movie. Never mind the Robert De Niro-ish feat of shedding forty pounds for the movie, Hanks is asked to carry the film by himself for seventy two minutes and pulls it off with aplomb. During the first part of the film, and the long middle part, Robert Zemeckis's handle on things is as surehanded as Hanks's performance. This could have been a GREAT movie. As it stands, it is merely good. The film's third act lapses badly into melodrama and vague symbolism. The final scene of the movie is simply puzzling. But those first two acts are a marvel. The scenes of Chuck Noland's life before his island imprisonment are filmed with zip and pinnache, replete with camera work that is flashy and unassuming at the same time. Noland is a man on the go and the film is paced to match. The culmination of this is the depiction of the plane crash. There is not a better plane crash on film. Like Chuck Noland, we can only watch in horror as the plane dives into the ocean. When the film moves to the island, the filmmaking changes drastically. Instead of zip and pinnache, we get languor and stagnation. The film's editing slows waaaay down and Zemeckis fills the screen with brooding, ominous seascapes. All the while, there is no music. There is a hint of background music in the first part of the film--the film's score is nearly subliminal or absent all together. In the second act, there is only the sounds of the sea and of the island and of Hanks's voice. By the end of the film's oceanic reverie, I began to speculate about what Joseph Conrad or Herman Melville would have thought of this film, since their themes of alienation at sea are present here in spades.

Comedown: The end of the film put paid to all that in short order. There are touches in the last part of the movie--mainly in Hanks's performance as a man who has been alone for too long only to find that he is alone again--but they are few. I like the scene where Hanks surveys the remains of a banquet featuring sushi and king crab, for instance, and I like the hint of anger Hanks conveys in his scenes with Helen Hunt as the girlfriend who has married someone else. But the film squanders an opportunity here to examine Hanks's re-entry into the world. The film cops out with a title card that reads, "Four Weeks Later." There is a full score in this part of the movie, which Zemeckis uses to shamelessly manipulate the audience. At the very end of the film, Chuck takes it upon himself to deliver the one package that he didn't open. While this scene DOES provide a bookend for the film, it adds nothing to the film's theme and impact. It makes the audience grope for some half baked symbolism, which is the last impression the audience takes away from the film. Which is too bad, really.