A time-challenger man caught at his own game ...

Rating: 8/10 (23 March 2015)

What if "Cast Away" was only focused on the Island sequence? Say, five or ten minutes of exposition, the pivotal plane, crash, the Island and then make it end with the freighter passing by an exhausted Chuck Noland on his raft? Maybe it would have puzzled many viewers but I think the movie would have worked better.
That ending would have been the film in a nutshell : a man overcoming the limitations he inherited from comfortable and convenient modernity in order to domesticate wildlife, to make everything we take for granted a challenge worth to triumph over, and to find over patience and intelligence, the strength to go back to civilization. "Cast Away" was the modernization of the stranded-in-an-Island myth, of the Robinson Crusoe figure, something that was begging to catch the eye of a talented filmmaker, which it did.
The before-and-after are only important on a minor screen writing scale, yes we have a character's arc to close, a man who starts as a cocky workaholic employee for FedEx and then discover that there's more in life than stress around the clock, if you try to challenge time, beware that time challenges you (that would've made an interesting tag-line) We've been through that thousands of times anyway, so why wouldn't Zemeckis trust our intelligence and spare us the whole sequence of Chuck 'learning his lesson' while he's back to ordinary life?
Indeed, the film is told through Chuck's perspective, like him, we find ourselves confined in a hostile world, after a spectacular crash sequence, we discover the island through his eyes: the loneliness, the silence only covered by the perpetual sound of tides, the darkness only enlightened by the shining stars. It's nature at its most majestic and scary. Then step by stem, through a meticulous and patient directing, we see Chuck trying to get over each step of comfort: finding anything that would make shoes, food or habitat. Anything with what is at hands.
And no matter how famous Robinson Crusoe's story is, or how used to Survivor reality shows we are, this is cliché-proof, because although we know it's a matter of time before he learns fishing, before he makes fire or ropes, Zemeckis opts for a documentary-film like precision that keeps our eyes hooked on the 'how' rather than on the 'when'. We don't have time to wonder what will happen when we're fascinated by what we see. And Tom Hanks brings so much naturalness than we share every feeling he has, even the ache on his teeth and the inconvenient self-made remedy he makes, is something we can oddly relate to.
The trickiest part of the film is with Kelly (Helen Hunt). She represents his last connection to the real world, but for some reason, I wasn't impressed by the flash in / flash out sequences on her little picture in the pocket watch. She's his love life, okay. He was about to propose her before the crash, got it. But didn't he have parents? Cousins? Friends? The character of Kelly was made like an artificial synthesis of every human relationship in Chuck's life it made the ending even more incongruous, as if Chuck was just a man of his job and a woman. Then having lost one, he had to focus on the other. The romance was too predictable for such an epic start.
And I'm sure "Cast Away" would be regarded as a masterpiece had it focused on the Island, not just a classic film of the early 2000's. The only emotional climax it deserved was the farewell to Wilson. Yes, Wilson! The film's ticket to immortality, a character made of a Volley Ball with a bloody hand that drew a smiling figure, a hazard leading to Chuck having finally someone to speak to. Wilson confirms what was hinted in the pilot's burial sequence, a man needs to be a man, and one of the first manifestations of civilization were funerals. A man needs abstractions, he needs to communicate and that's what Wilson is, and we're so in-line with Hanks performance that we take Wilson as a person too, and his disappearance is heartbreaking.
And it was necessary, because that was the only way for Chuck to lose the ultimate connection with the Island, to be normal again. At one point of dementia, he was almost going to drown just to catch a damn volleyball, this was the final test before finally getting back to his senses, and waiting for either death or a boat to catch him. The death of Wilson, so to speak, was the only possible climax. Having Chuck getting back to life and discovering all its insolent accommodations of modern life, sleeping on the ground, having troubles is important on a broad way, but not within the context of the film.
So, why not leaving that for our imagination? I thought a man like Chuck would become an instant celebrity, would publish a book, would understand Kelly getting married, would get back to his family etc. etc. Oddly enough, Hanks plays the second Chuck like a kind of Forrest Gump whose slowness would result from that trauma. It's like watching a whole other film. A pity that the film gets drown in cinematic conventions for a concept that asked for more simplicity and straightforward narrative, and I suspect the film would have garnered more awards and nominations had it focused on that, and if Zemeckis was so eager showing the aftermath, then make a two-part movie and leave the Island for this one.
The Island sequence was enough to make a masterpiece or in other words: why would you put a cliché kiss-in-the-rain scene in a film where the most memorable relationship and interaction is between a man and a volleyball !!!