From the previews, we understood that Cast Away was about a man marooned on a remote island - thus the title . . . like the Castaways of Gilligan’s Island. But in case we hadn’t noticed the spelling, the film’s title sequence makes it clear that there are two words, not one; and that the verb, as much as the noun, is what is at issue here: who, or what, is cast away, and what is held onto, and how we come to invest meaning in those things and persons that give us courage to persist in a savage world - a world we humans have learned to civilize and to create an ostensible order out of chaos - the first lesson of Genesis.

Such a highly regulated and signified order is maintained by our innate temporal sensibility. We count; we tell time; we run our lives by the movement of the heavens and by the seasons, and by the ebb and flow of the tides. FedEx is a most excellent banner for our own time: “The world, on time.” Chuck Noland, a supercharged FedEx field executive played by Tom Hanks, sees the world in terms of minutes lost and pagers to respond to; and that perception ought to speak volumes to a world where productivity counts more than family. Noland is just enough aware of this to allow the audience’s brief encounter with him and his girlfriend, played sympathetically (how else?) by Helen Hunt, feel like a missed opportunity.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some find the pace of Cast Away to be painfully slow. Noland’s first ten or fifteen minutes on his island are presented in very nearly real time; and, for a moment, we worry that the rest of our adventure with him will be as protracted. Some in the audience will resist this awareness and, I think, misinterpret their own feelings. But it seems to me that the director makes exactly the right choice here that we might have the same response to time’s passing as his unfortunate hero. Still, some will feel that the film is an essay in overkill and redundancy; others will see it as a monument of understatement, considering the stakes.

As it gradually becomes clear to Noland that being marooned on his tiny island may last for the remainder of his life, he begins to track time and, like all of his fellow species, invests it with meaning - meaning about worth, the sort of worth that keeps us from hanging ourselves out of sheer boredom. It is the meaning we attach to everything we see and feel that makes awareness of our position on this planet different from fish and coconuts who, as nearly as we can tell, have no such burden.

At first, Noland invents someone to talk to - a volleyball, washed up along with a handful of similarly rerouted FedEx parcels, with a face painted in his own blood - someone in whom to project his fears and his hopes. When he loses “Wilson” during his last desperate endeavor to leave the island, he has the closest thing to a psychotic experience where, in his attempt to rescue the ball, he nearly allows himself to drown. This is perhaps the most exquisite moment in the film, as Noland must decide whether to go on even without his vinyl soulmate. It is the same decision he had made every day in regards the life and the woman he left before he boarded that ill-fated plane; and, as we must assume, the same sort of conflict that she must be having, believing him to have been lost forever in the crash.

Director Robert Zemeckis has attempted twice before, in Contact and Forrest Gump, to make “meaningful” films, but in both cases allowed himself to be seduced and distracted by artifice and technique (to say nothing of Contact’s awkward romance between Foster and McConaughey.) Partly because of improvements in the science of cinematic special effects and its relative lack of novelty, today’s audiences are little distracted by effects that are obviously no longer intended to be gawked at. Instead we are able to incorporate them into the unfolding drama in much the same way, in films decades earlier, as painted mattes were convincingly able to convey an invented sense of place.

While there were momentary lapses in Cast Away for one reason or other (especially at the very end when an all too attractive woman is permitted to be seen getting out of her truck, thus making the matter of choice too facile), I was never out of the film for long enough for me to lose my foothold. Once we are introduced to Hanks, the film relentlessly pursues the action from his point of view, flirting with, but never indulging in the sort of irony where the audience is clued into what is going on, but the protagonist is not. When Noland tosses “Wilson” off the island in despair and disgust, and then just as wildly runs after him, we see the ball in the foreground slightly hidden from his view. Most films today would pander to such a disconnect, buoying themselves into a false sense of conceit about life’s hard truth.

But Cast Away understands that the hard truth is making a decision to go on, even when you have the ball. The question of living one’s life every day as if at a crossroads, and making a choice, consciously and conscientiously, is at the heart of this film. Noland is exiled to a fate that only he will likely ever know about; he discards all but the three most precious things that link him to what he felt was his humanity and his purpose for living, with little more than hope and desperate courage and the meaning he found in them. Civilization has made life easier for us, to be sure; but in the process, it has left us with few choices of worth, making the living of it less meaningful.
 

Leonard Norwitz
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