Team Gump makes the better blockbuster

Just when it looked as if Oscar Y2K would be a sob-fest over the death of the quality (or even decent) Hollywood blockbuster, Robert Zemeckis squeezed Tom Hanks and his desert island into theatrical release for the final week of December. In Hollywood, it seems, they live and die by the clock, to use the professional mantra of Hanks' Chuck Noland, a high-ranking employee at Federal Express. And while it would have been nice if, say, You Can Count On Me had a chance at Best Picture, it doesn't much look like it will happen now that Team Gump has entered the race.

COURTESY 20TH CENTURY FOX Tom Hanks ceased writing his angry letter to Norelco after realizing it would be impossible to send.

Which isn't to say that Cast Away, in which Hanks finds himself marooned alone for four years on a desert island after his plane goes down over the ocean, is the best film of the year. But it is the biggest and perhaps the most memorable, and, contrary to claims by the Coen brothers, Zemeckis' film is the season's true Homeric epic—a trite "What if?" premise transformed into a gripping tale of human perseverance.

Cast Away is more or less divided into three sections: Chuck before the crash, Chuck on the island, and Chuck's struggle, once he's been rescued, to reinsert himself into his old life in Memphis. Most of the attention the film has received has centered on the island portion of the film, but William Broyles Jr.'s thoughtful script and Zemeckis' imaginative direction do a remarkably economical job of setting up Chuck's character before the crash. "Eighty-seven hours is an eternity," he tells a roomful of new FedEx employees in Moscow. Chuck should know—he and girlfriend Kelly Frears (Helen Hunt) have built their relationship on the few free hours afforded them by Chuck's constant travel. Before getting on the plane that will kill four and strand him on an uninhabited island, Chuck sits with Kelly in a car and efficiently cuts open his Christmas present with a Swiss Army knife, as though it were a particularly important package—the scene neatly illustrates both his resourcefulness and his brusque but not uncaring way in matters of the heart.

All of which makes Chuck a believably gritty, shrewd Odysseus figure once we are alone with him. As if to punctuate his earlier credo about the power of the clock, an explosion irrevocably jars his world when he removes his watch in the airplane lavatory. Probably Cast Away's strongest moment, the scene of the jet's descent and crash is brilliantly staged—visceral, terrifying, and blessedly free of the car bomb-in-the-peanuts-can-style visual effects of recent "hits" like Deep Blue Sea. Don Burgess's cinematography puts us right into the ocean with Chuck and the limitless darkness surrounding him. If we didn't care about him before—and there are people who make a point of not caring about Hanks—we do now, after sharing in his indignity.

The cinematic sensitivity Zemeckis displays in the crash scene characterizes most of Cast Away. We are not asked to pity Chuck's predicament so much as we are thrown into it ourselves. And what would we do if stranded alone on a desert island? It turns out that, instead of reading our 10 favorite books, we'd be well enough occupied with spearing hermit crabs, inventing fire, and shitting in the bushes. Hanks' performance is a physical tour de force, to put it mildly; not only did he drop 50 pounds for the final third of the film, but there's hardly another star able to maintain such a realistic, intelligible rapport with him or herself. What would we feel if Meg Ryan, or even Tom Cruise, dove into the mud to lap water out of a leaf?

Unfortunately, Cast Away eventually betrays the delicacy it realized earlier. When the music, previously almost nonexistent, swells up during Chuck's thrilling escape by makeshift sailboat, the intimacy built up between Hanks, the camera, and the viewer feels severely intruded upon. It's as though the filmmakers had all along been tacitly revealing a precious secret before fearing at the last minute the audience's inability to keep it. But while the film's bookend final scene, in which Chuck stands mulling his future on a Texas highway intersection, feels patronizing and unreal, Hanks' reunion with Hunt rings as true as anything in the film before it.

In spite of its narrative frailties, Cast Away's survival against all odds, its greatest accomplishment, is an insight into the bare essentials of telling a story. We are deprived of Chuck's initial social readjustments—four weeks pass in an instant after a huge ship collects him—but did we really need to watch him shave for the first time? And who would have guessed that a volleyball could be a sympathetic character?

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