I did not expect to see another film from
the year 2000 as good as Traffic, but this is it. Robert Zemeckis' new movie--from
an original screenplay by William Broyles Jr.--begins with
a vision of advanced capitalist life as a time management hell. Chuck Nolan (Tom
Hanks) is a high-ranking FedEx executive obsessed with efficiency, a minister of the Gospel
According to Frederick Winslow Taylor. In a scene at a Christmas dinner, he declares about one of his company's
new schemes, "It's a perfect combination of systems management and
technology!" But for whom? Human beings or cyborgs? To heighten the irony,
Nolan first appears preaching his doctrines to former
citizens of the USSR in Moscow, now working for the huge American corporation he
represents instead of a state owned enterprise with slightly less demanding
standards.
Perhaps
the best short phrase to describe Cast Away would be "putting things in
perspective". While Nolan is on his way to a new assignment,
his plane crashes in a
deserted area of the South Pacific, and he is violently thrust into a new,
unknown environment--a tropical island on which he is the sole inhabitant. (I
should mention in passing that the crash sequence is about the most frightening
thing of its kind I have ever seen in a theatrical motion picture. It is
definitely not to be recommended to anyone who suffers from fear of flying.) For
the major part of the film--corresponding to a period of four years in his
life--Nolan remains shipwrecked on the island, until he finally constructs a raft
and ventures out on the open seas. Ultimately, he finally makes it back to the
United States and the welcoming arms of his employer after being picked up by a freighter
bearing a huge load of containerized cargo.
In
previous movies, Zemeckis has filmed characters who stood in an intrinsically
eccentric relation to their environment: in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? it is the
two dimensional Toons living in a world populated by three dimensional humans;
in Forrest Gump, it is the protagonist who wanders through famous scenes of
twentieth century history like Simplizissimus adrift in the ravaged landscape of
Germany in the Thirty Years War. In Cast Away
Zemeckis achieves the same effect of estrangement but by
starting with a completely "adjusted" character who is then pulled
out of his familiar world by a terrifying accident.
The film does not plunge Nolan into a back-to-nature
utopia that provides a
happy contrast to his routinized corporate existence. Last year's abominable The
Beach had prostituted whatever remains of the Romantic myth of escaping to a
desert isle, but Zemeckis wisely distances himself from that myth as much he
avoids the execrable "dramality" of
Survivor. Instead, Cast Away goes
back to the eighteenth century, to Daniel Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe, to the second
Discourse of J.-J. Rousseau and Denis Diderot's Supplement to the Voyage of
Bougainville, with their provocative speculations about the origins of human
culture. In this context, a horrifying episode in which Chuck has to use a ice
skate to extract an infected tooth more recalls a rite of passage like tattooing or circumcision than emergency surgery.
Cast Away neither depicts nature
as a kindly nurturing mother nor as "red in tooth and claw," but as an
impersonal, implacable power that forces sentient beings to yield to its demands
or perish. The film offers a vivid dramatic presentation of the total
indifference of the natural world to the human one early on, when Nolan tries to
escape from the island using an inflatable raft, and the waves relentlessly
pound him back. This environment submits Chuck, who is happiest living in a world
where everything can be "managed", to a
review course in social institutions like tool-making and food-gathering whose
beginnings lie so far back in history they are simply taken for granted in the
FedEx world--the one which is always "on time".
Yet
in being forced to repeat the development of the race, Chuck's most remarkable
experiences have less to do with the way he develops his survival skills than
how he attempts to create a humanly livable environment for himself--most
conspicuously in the way he transforms a Wilson AVP volleyball into a companion
he names after the ball's manufacturer. In fact, the most poignant moment in the
movie occurs when "Wilson" is lost at sea, and Chuck suffers as if it
were the loss of another living being. Yet it is by no means insignificant
that this anthropo-metamorphosis can only take place after he has marked the ball with a
bloody handprint in a fit of rage when he cuts himself badly while attempting to
start a fire by rubbing sticks together, a handprint he further alters by turning it
into a smiling face. Later, he goes further by bestowing a head of hair made of
strands of wild grass on "Wilson" .
Survivalism, which
feeds both upon a nostalgic desire to return to the days of the frontier as well
as apocalyptic projections of the future, has been in vogue for several decades
now. Yet Cast Away is as much as anything an
implicit critique of survivalist
ideology. If the movie does not present life in a state of nature as a
paradisiacal alternative to the "civilized" life depicted in the
opening scenes neither does it use the former as means of glorifying the
triumphs of technological progress in comparison to the one Thomas Hobbes
described in Leviathan as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short". But if there are no obvious answers in Cast Away, the underlying question the film raises is
whether the rage of human beings to impose their image on the environment may be
less a manifestation of their desire to dominate nature than of their need to
create a world which is a dwelling place as much as a refuge from hostile
natural forces.
By changing
a volleyball into a friend or by decorating the walls of his cave with crude
pictures of his fiancée that resemble archaic glyphs, Chuck is responding to a need that
cannot be explained in terms of utility. The prototype
of invention here is not the tool but
the work of art. And Cast Away clearly makes the point that such a product can
only come into existence through sacrifice--through the shedding of Chuck's
blood. However, this is not only the process by which an industrially
manufactured object comes to be Chuck's man Friday, but much more the process by
which the pain that overwhelms him from the beginning--the instant it is no
longer filtered out by the protective devices of centuries of human effort--is
itself transformed into something that transcends his wretched life on the
island.
It would be easy--perhaps too
easy--to view Cast Away as a kind of adventure film. (I have no doubt that the
combination of adventure and Tom Hanks in the starring role account for the
picture's huge success at the box office.) But
watching Cast Away, I was much more reminded
of Robert Bresson's great A Man Escaped (1956), about how a member of the
French Résistance during World War II who has been condemned to death succeeds in
escaping from prison, than I was of any conventional adventure story. Although
Bresson's movie has quite bit of suspense, it mainly focuses on the inner drama
of a character who is for the most part cut off from contact with the outside
world and who has to fall back upon his own resources. Chuck, it is true, is no
prisoner in the usual sense of the word, but his situation--at once thrown into
the wide open spaces but at the same time completely isolated from humankind--
makes him even more abjectly a prisoner than Fontaine (François Letterier), the
hero of A Man Escaped.
Like
A Man Escaped, Cast Away is more a drama of reflection than one of adventure.
And just as the Bresson refuses to abridge the continuing challenges to which
the protagonist must respond into a series of colorful incidents that whirl by
on the screen, Zemeckis' film gives a powerful resonance to each of Chuck's
gestures. The film has been criticized for the slow pace of the island sequence,
but as far as I can see Cast Away only gains by the necessary shift in tempo
that happens after Chuck is stranded. The movie's strength lies not in
bombarding the viewer with heavy-handed effects but in the way it patiently
leads up to the devastating conclusion which pursues the trajectory of Chuck's
odyssey after his return home and leaves him at both a literal and figurative
crossroads.
Like Zemeckis' most recent production, What
Lies Beneath, Cast Away was photographed by Don Burgess. But where
the previous work evoked the stylistic elegance of a Hitchcock thriller, the
new film is simplicity itself--a simplicity that is at some moments almost
terrifying--and most impressively simple in the island sequence with its
powerful vistas of water and sky in the South Pacific, images that bring to
mind F.W. Murnau's masterpiece, Tabu (1931) or even the Gauguin
paintings that were a source of inspiration for Murnau himself. Nothing
here gets in the way of the unfolding of the fable. But it would
not be fair to give due credit to Tom Hanks, who appears in nearly every scene
and contributes immeasurably to the movie's artistic achievement. After Saving
Private Ryan, Hanks seems destined to become the James Stewart of his
generation, the actor who personifies the not quite so average American guy
for the audience, and it would be difficult to imagine a more appropriate
performer for the role of Chuck.
What
Lies Beneath was brilliant for its first two-thirds but fumbled badly when it
came to the denouement. Cast Away doesn't miss a single beat right up to the
final shot. If Traffic primarily owes its strength to Steven
Soderbergh's fluid, elliptical style, Cast Away is equally indebted to a far
more traditional style of American film making, one that relies upon a very
linear narrative and a carefully calculated approach to constructing a motion
picture. Robert Zemeckis more than adequately demonstrates just how
brilliantly effective that style still can be when used by a talented and
conscientious director.
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