Falling Coconuts

Rating: Null/10 (7 April 2001)

*** SPOILERS AHEAD FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE END! ***
I regret to say that "Cast Away" is a terrible movie. Even the title is a dead giveaway that we are about to be subjected to one of those unforgettable moral lessons that should be cast in bronze for the future generations to behold. Which is too bad because I like the gentle quirkiness that Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis bring to the movies they do together. One can almost feel the love they pour into their work: well-thought-out, carefully crafted, professionally done pieces of entertainment. Humble fables on a grand scale. They consciously try not to insult the audience's intelligence or offend them in any way. But the operative word I'm using here is "consciously". And, once we finally recognize what the moral of the fable MEANS, what it is is deeply disturbing.
Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) is a time-obsessed overseas manager for Fed Ex whose plane crashes and gets stranded alone in a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean and, when he gets back, he finds that he has lost everything that mattered for him and helped him survive his ordeal. Now, totally lost and alone, he must decide what road to take to go on with his life. Not a bad idea for an adventure movie, even if they turned it into a silly no-brainer, which this movie clearly isn't. Being that so, what happened?

For starters, there is not one moment in "Cast Away" where I felt that anything was at stake. Not once. Since we know that at some point he will get back home (those fat exposition scenes at the beginning are ripe for some neat payoffs), we at least expect for something terrifying to happen to him while he is in the island. And so we sit back and wait for those moments of transcendence to happen, those shocking instants when he suddenly realizes that he is alone, that he is mortal, that he will never be rescued, that he does not want to die. We just don't want to watch him as he buries a dead body, opens coconuts, makes a fire, knocks out an abscessed tooth, or builds a raft. We in the audience want to FEEL what is going on inside this man. Those moments never do come. Perhaps the most significant episode, where he tries to take his own life, is never actually shown (but rather "explained" later in the most naked, and weakest, scene of the movie). What we end up getting is a gleam in his eye, a volleyball, and the sound of falling coconuts, and that last one is played for a couple of startlers and a laugh.
Hanks works very hard. Harder than on any other thing he has done up to this point (production was shut for one year until he lost fifty pounds), and he IS impressive (he is a gifted actor); but he is (still) a lightweight actor, and he is paralyzed by the too-worked-out conception, this goddamned control-freak mania among filmmakers to tie every single loose filament together until there is nothing, not a single open space for us to walk into and rightfully reclaim as ours.
There is something else simmering under the surface of this movie. "Cast Away"? What it is being casted away? Is it doubts? Hopes? Fear? Jealousy? Love? Chuck Noland hated that island and returned to the white middle-class values he was violently torn off; he has ice in a glass again; his work; he lost his girl but still has another chance.

At the end, we get our moment of transcendence, the conception this movie was working towards from the beginning: Noland, alone in the intersection where the movie started, looks around at the four roads he has to choose from. His brow is clean. No words come out of his mouth. What decision is he going to make? Music. Fade to black. End credits.

My guess is he doesn't need to make any decision: he is Everyman: we are meant to decide for him. We witnessed his decency, concern, bravery, toughness, tenacity, and self-reliance. He didn't really need anyone to survive. We can do.
If Tom Hanks doesn't hurry up and cleans up his act he will turn into the favorite poster boy for the ultra conservative right.

Book burnings and Nazi flags should be the next step.