Parable of Life on a Deserted Island

Rating: 10/10 (9 March 2020)

"I've got to keep breathing because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?"
For a film noted for its sparseness, Robert Zemeckis' Cast Away is one of the richest film-going experiences I have ever had. It is a story of mythic simplicity: a man, stranded alone on an island. And yet, this film contains multitudes.
Tom Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a Fed Ex executive whose life is dictated by the clock. The love of his life is Kelly Frears, played by Helen Hunt. While performing a routine delivery, Noland's Fed Ex aircraft crashes, and he washes ashore on a small tropical island. These are the select few components of Cast Away's plot. The film is carried almost completely by character and theme. Once the story gets to the island, the movie becomes a deeply reflective allegory. William Broyles Jr.'s script is fluid, moving organically around its central character, following him through the trials of island survival and the human mind. It is impossible to discuss Cast Away without mentioning Tom Hanks. Hanks' performance is an all-encompassing master class. He is tasked with selling every conceivable emotion from sorrow, heartache, fear, and misery, to hope, joy, and optimism in his time in and off the island. Then there is the physical transformation from plump Everyman to raw, naked vulnerability as an emaciated creature of the jungle. We spend an extreme amount of time with Tom Hanks in Cast Away. He is so layered, so pitch perfect in every moment, that you never want to leave him.
Zemeckis excels with the details of Noland's years-long struggle to survive. The direction is intimate and tactile, placing us right there with Chuck as he uses relatable ingenuity (he is never superhumanly intelligent) to fight for each new day. While so much of the pleasure of watching Cast Away is the realism in which it depicts island survival, The film is always operating on the level of myth or fable. The island is not simply a setting. Fire is not simply a source of warmth. A volleyball is not simply a toy. Deeper meaning permeates every pore of Cast Away. When Chuck Noland washes up on that island, he lays out the pieces of human desire. Longing, desperation, joy, companionship, hopelessness, and resilience. Those tenets of the human heart are what Cast Away is really about. The story is told completely in metaphor, lending every small moment an impact that goes beyond the surface. What is so remarkable among all of these ideas is the entertainment value encased within them. Tom Hanks makes wonderful company, and Robert Zemeckis wisely finds room for humor. Cast Away is also a beautiful looking and sounding film. It works on very basic levels as well as the metaphorical ones.
Finally, in a third act that left many wrongly underwhelmed, Cast Away reveals itself as, among many other things, a suicide parable, and it's themes crescendo. In one of the greatest monologues of Hanks' career, we're given a line that transcendently crystallizes the film's messages. A line that has stuck with me for years, and one that I believe has the power to change lives. To anyone who has ever experienced intense loneliness or depression, anyone who has felt hopeless in the face of the enormity of life's challenges, Cast Away is a spiritual journey. The movie holds a special personal connection to myself, as someone who has been emotionally paralyzed by depression. Like me, it doesn't wallow in sadness, but instead pushes toward gentle optimism about overcoming it. It provides a pillar to my own philosophy. An extraordinary inspiration when I feel marooned within my own life.
99/100