Cast Away (2006, DVD)

I simply don't understand you people. Weren't you ever dragged to church by your parents? Made to sit through an awards ceremony at your school? Forced to watch your father emcee a fundraiser? Obliged to endure your little sister's piano recital? Tortured by the repetitive lectures of an inept teacher? And what on earth do you folks do in such situations? Have you discovered how to nap with your eyes open? Is that why you don't know how to daydream without the assistance of a formulaic novel or a schmaltzy movie?

I couldn't even begin to count the hours of my life that I've spent thinking about how I would behave if I were stranded on a desert island. And since the existence of films such as Cast Away proves that there are large numbers of you who simply don't know how to start when it comes to daydreaming, allow me to give you a list of my other favorite topics to amuse myself with when I find myself trapped in the presence of people who are hellbent on watching the Academy Awards: 1) What if I survived a nuclear holocaust? 2) What if I could fly? 3) What if I could set people on fire just by thinking about it really really hard? 4) What if I were among the first to colonize the moon? 5) What if I could travel through time? and 6) What if I could square a circle and trisect an angle with only a compass and straight-edge at my disposal?

Pastor Riley's sermons at St. Paul's United Methodist Church in El Paso were about thirty-five minutes long, which was ample time for me to think about how I would end up stranded on a desert island and to imagine how different things would be if I had matches and a Swiss Army knife and sturdy boots or nothing but my swimming trunks. Cast Away assumes that I would need help imagining what it would be like to be on an island with ice skates and a volleyball at my disposal. That's not entirely worthless so far as fodder for daydreaming goes, but I can handle it within my own imagination in a few seconds. I really don't need to see it worked out on the screen over the course of two tedious hours.

But what bothers me most about Cast Away isn't the time that Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) spends alone on the island. What bothers me is that that time is merely an incident along the way of a perfectly unengaging love story between Noland and Kelly Frears (Helen Hunt), who calls Noland the "love of [her] life" when he returns after his four years alone in the Pacific. That he is the love of her life is unfortunate, since she has already built another life in which he is no longer welcome. And maybe that says something about her maturity and what she owes to her daughter and the man she married in Chuck's absence. Then again, maybe it says something about her own cowardice and the way she intends to stick to what she knows. We can't really tell what to make of her decision because we don't know her at all. We don't know anything about her except that she was once engaged to a man who was a grade-A goofus. Chuck may have gotten over his goofosity while he was on the island (again, we don't know), but the man she remembers is the one who lectured to FedEx employees about the sin of turning one's back on time. Any wisdom that Chuck found on the island has not been demonstrated to Kelly, so we have reason to assume that her 'love,' whatever it was, was as shallow as the love that plenty of young, rising professionals encourage themselves to feel for other young, rising professionals.

Mangiotto has already articulated the flaws in this film's construction and its unforgivable reliance on heavy-handed symbolism in his excellent review. "In a sense," he writes, "one could say that Cast Away's middle portion is as adrift and lost from its framing story as Hanks' Noland character is from civilization. The scenes in civilization are harried and loud - a confusion of quick character workshops and lead-fisted symbol and irony. A quick note to young men going off to war or departing on a holiday, don't give your sweetie a present to be opened on your return and never say 'I'll be right back.' These are suicidally ironic gestures on a level with showing your sarge a picture of your girl right before you storm that German machine gun embankment."

The film's symbolism is at its most unforgivably loud precisely where it can least afford to be so: at the very end. Without spelling things out too clearly, I will ask my readers to exercise their imagination (which is more than Cast Away will do). I will ask you to think to yourselves about what we might use from real life to symbolize a choice. If you've come up with something that is familiar to you from literature (such as a Robert Frost poem perhaps) and political speeches (such as every presidential campaign for as long as any of us have been alive) and even folklore (such as where one might go to make a choice concerning one's eternal soul), then you've properly anticipated Cast Away's concluding symbol.

I will say this: the ending comes as an absolute surprise. You'll be thinking to yourself, "Zemeckis couldn't possibly have the juevos to leave us with such a sickening taste of tacky and contrived symbolism in our mouths!" But he does have the juevos. What he doesn't have is a film worth watching.


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Mangiotto's excellent discussion of Cast Away can be found here:
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-473B-4574E0A4-3A4BDC9C-prod3/tk_~CB008.1.13