If you can't tell by my first name, I've received my fair share of "Cast Away" jokes in my 23 years of life.
If you don't know why, you've both never seen "Cast Away" and have probably lived on a deserted island for the last two decades without internet or a volleyball to keep you company. So... Spoiler alert?
Jokes aside, it has been almost 18 years since Robert Zemekis' survival tale came out. Watching it recently, I realized just how much of a classic it is.
If you need a refresher, the brunt of the movie takes place on an island where Chuck Noland, a FedEx worker obsessed with being on time, is essentially stranded in time for years. There is no one else there with him; he is utterly alone and ill-equipped, aside from some FedEx packages and rubble from the plane crash he survived.
Of course, compounding his situation is the fact that he was prepared to propose to his longtime girlfriend Kelly (Helen Hunt) before his plane went down in the ocean. Rather than discouraging him, though, this only motivates Noland, who spends much of his time wasting his flashlight battery looking at his wife's photograph. Eventually, he grows so lonely that he befriends a volleyball that features his bloody handprint, and he names it Wilson (and thus opened the door for a cavalcade of jokes about my name).
What makes the movie unique is the fact that when Noland is on the island, so are we. We spend virtually no time looking at Kelly's life, at what's happening with his job, at the fallout from the crash and his disappearance. We don't watch rescue efforts, we don't see distraught family members—no, we simply watch Chuck on the island.
Because of this extremely ambitious gamble on Zemekis and the screenwriters' part, we get a rather unsettling sense of what it might be like to be in such a situation. Survival, in this situation, becomes something like a curse, because we have no idea if Noland is going to be rescued (unless you watched the trailers for the movie, which frustratingly spoiled that). If he keeps waiting, we start to see, he will either die or spend the rest of his life confiding his feelings to a bloody volleyball with a cool name.
Being with Chuck throughout the film, we are ready with him when he decides that he has to risk leaving the island and saving himself. For goodness sake, we cry with him when he loses his VOLLEYBALL to the ocean, in a scene that somehow inexplicably became one of the more touching depictions of loss in recent American film.
But all these incredible accomplishments aren't, in and of themselves, what makes "Cast Away" a great movie to me. What makes it great is the payoff when Chuck actually does get rescued at sea and brought back to society.
That's because we haven't been any more privy than him to what happened back home. We might, for example, be indignant that Chuck was declared dead without a trace of his death to be found. We are likely to be shocked when he meets Kelly's husband, too. After all, he spent so much time talking to her in his imagination on the island, and so we just assumed he would return and rightfully have his life go back to normal.
The movie raises all kinds of conundrums that we thankfully don't have to think about ordinarily, like how long we should wait for our significant other to come back if they are lost at sea and declared dead. Just like Chuck does, you feel both hurt and also sorry for the awful predicament Kelly is placed in upon his return.
It is truly heartbreaking and yet beautiful watching him give up the life he lost by no fault of his own. But thankfully, Zemekis doesn't leave us there. He, instead, gives a moment of powerful integration, where Noland muses with a drink in his hand about how the lessons he learned on the island will help him move forward.
The movie ends at a literal crossroads and with potential romantic hope in the offing for Noland. By that point, it doesn't really matter where he goes next—he just knows that the lesson is to keep going, because he is still alive against all odds.
There are flaws to this movie, of course. It spends a little too much time building up a storyline about Noland's punctuality at the beginning, one that doesn't really pay off commensurately. There is no way that Noland should have survived on the island, especially not with the infection he sustained. It's also worth noting that Zemekis' gamble, focusing on Noland exclusively, works only because an actor with the charm and skill of Hanks is in the role. Again, the man makes a friendship with a volleyball believable somehow; if that isn't great acting, I don't know what is (although Wilson did win a Critics' Choice Award for "Best Inanimate Object").
So go back and watch this movie again. It's incredible for what it tries and mostly succeeds at doing.
