Cast Away

by NEIL NORMAN, Evening Standard

America's love affair with Tom Hanks shows no signs of abating, if the opening US box-office figures for his latest film are to be believed.

He remains the guy with whom you'd most want to be stranded on a desert island. Which is just as well, because in Robert Zemeckis's updating of the Crusoe tale the audience is stranded with Hanks - and Hanks alone - for well over half of the movie.

Few movie stars and even fewer actors (and Hanks is both) have the epic watchability of the dough-faced Hanksman. He has the ability to make even the simplest actions seem eminently compelling, taking us right into the heart of ordinary human activity and turning it into some kind of performance art.

Hanks can turn the simple Boy Scout shtick of attempting to light a fire by rubbing sticks together into a full-screen experience that is strangely satisfying. What a pity that he doesn't have a better vehicle for his talents in Cast Away, which - as Stranded Movies go - is a bit of a soggy slog.

Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a FedEx systems engineer whose job takes him all over the world at the drop of a package; he is a clock watcher in extremis, a man transfixed by time. "Eighty-seven hours is an eternity," he admonishes harassed FedEx employees in Moscow, whence he is sent to kick some Russian butt and get the trucks rolling efficiently.

Even on Christmas Day he gets paged to fly across the world to sort out some problem. As he steps out of the car, he turns and gives his long-suffering and absurdly patient girl-friend (Helen Hunt) a small box, clearly containing a ring: "I'll be right back," he says.

Now when anyone in the movies says "I'll be right back" it's a dollar to a dime that they will be a) disastrously delayed or b) dead within 15 minutes.

In Noland's case, he is the sole survivor of a plane crash and ends up on a remote island in the South Pacific for four years. Which is where we are stuck with him for 75 minutes or so of screen time.

During that period there is very little dialogue. Hanks starts talking to himself, and later, when desperate loneliness sets in, begins conversing with a volleyball which has washed up in a FedEx box and upon whose surface he paints a rudimentary face in his own blood. "Wilson", as he is dubbed (from the sporting-goods manufacturer on the label) becomes his Man Friday - though not as useful as Crusoe's little man.

Still, he oversees and grins benignly when Noland achieves small triumphs of survival, catching fish, trapping rainwater in coconut shells and eventually, after much torture of the hands, lighting a fire. He even accompanies him on the raft that he finally assembles to leave the island and seek salvation or death on the high seas.

Though Wilson's fate, which I shall not spoil for you, is not destined to be shared with Noland, who is picked up by a Russian container ship and delivered back to the USA a "profoundly" changed man.

If you factor in all the great cast-away tales and films from Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to Golding's Pincher Martin and from Lucy Irvine to Bunuel, a rather compulsive French telly series, and a squillion variations on the theme (even allowing for intergalactic strandeds like Robinson Crusoe on Mars) you'd think that Zemeckis and Hanks (whose idea this allegedly was) might have come up with something a little less dull.

The interminable concluding section of the film reveals just how much Noland has changed - and not just physically. Hanks spent the intervening year between the start of the film and the second half losing weight on a special palm diet (ie, he ate only what he could fit into the palm of his hand; which presumably did not mean a handful of chocolate). Method acting at this extreme is at least legitimised but it is to little avail.

Whatever good work Hanks does is undone in his survival quest for endurance of the human spirit and generally revealing how a nice but manically stressed guy can change into a nice but Zen-like philosophical kind of guy who symbolically hands back the family watch given to him by his girl-friend (who has married her dentist in the intervening years, believing Hanks to be dead) because, ya know, time's not as important as all that, folks. The extended moralising simply drags the film down into the ho-hums and Zemeckis has real trouble capping a work that should have concluded at least half an hour earlier.

I could have done without the silly whale stuff, too. During Noland's raft journey away from the island he is kept alert and alive by whale music and the odd waterspout to prevent him from succumbing to death. Why, one whale even surfaces and winks at him.

Christ, even the whales have heard about Tom Hanks. I'm surprised they didn't ask for his autograph.

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