Triumph of the human spirit...howzat?

Rating: Null/10 (26 December 2000)

CAST AWAY has gotten much praise as a sort of existential
blockbuster: Tom Hanks, a stick, a volleyball and a crab for a
whole hour! J. Hoberman has memorably described as the
"bleakest vision of human existence in studio filmmaking since
Douglas Sirk's IMITATION OF LIFE."
Beg to differ. The key that winds this baby up is the theme that
unites most high-period Tom Hanks movies: the American can-do
spirit. Like the guy using a sock and a ballpoint pen to fix a
spaceship in APOLLO THIRTEEN, like the guy firing a pistol feebly
at a Panzer tank in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, Hanks' Chuck Noland,
FedEx work and late-twentieth-century guy extraordinaire, doesn't
so much look into the abyss as kick its butt using technology and a
little bit of Yankee elbow grease. Hanks, a fan of 2001, seems to
have completely mislearned its lessons: no major commercial
film artist, not even James Cameron, seems so enraptured by the
transcendent power of technos.
The director, Robert Zemeckis, lays it on thick at the beginning:
Chuck is a time-is-money type-A geek who sits with his fiancee
(Helen Hunt) and plots out quality time with her as they both peer
into identical datebooks. (Had the movie not been inexplicably set
in 1995, they could zap their Palm Pilots at each other.) Then,
marooned on a desert island...well, you'd think he'd learn
something about stopping to smell the roses. Or his laid-on-thick
emotional blockedness. Or something, other than how to rub two
sticks together. But, as if they studied Bresson and David Mamet,
Hanks and Zemeckis have no time for sticky feelings. It's
procedure, the how-to, that excites them. And though it must have
seemed terribly daring to spend so much time with one guy
onscreen, a static camera, and no music or dialogue, this stuff is
by far the most engaging in the movie.
The movie gets inspirational in its last movements, a tribute to
never giving up, or not letting go of your dream, or love-will-show-the-way, or some other development-world cliche.
The last moments of the movie are staggering in their inadequacy.
The filmmakers seem to have eschewed every possible cornball
ending, every chance for cheap uplift...and then they replace it with
nothing at all. The movie doesn't so much end as stop, as if the
screenwriter, puzzled and disgusted, threw his typewriter across
the room.
The level of drama isn't helped much by the casting of Helen Hunt
as Chuck's beloved. Is there a more unsympathetic major female
star in movies today? Hunt right now has the number one and two
movies in America. What are people seeing that I'm missing? And
does Hanks realize how much of this performance, which some
are touting as among the greatest of all time, is a carbon copy of
his work in a little number called JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO?