CAST AWAY

Maybe it’s a residue of Y2K, or a recognition of the year’s inferior film product, or a premonition of four years of George W. Bush, but survival has been the major theme of movies in 2000. From The Perfect Storm to Proof of Life, big stars have gone through hell to teach us the value of hanging in there. Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away calls to mind the former film, with its shots of Fed Ex executive Chuck Noland tossed on enormous waves in a tiny, condom-shaped raft. Earlier, Chuck’s plane crashed in one of the most harrowing such sequences since Fearless, and his reckless rescue of the pocket watch his fiancée, Kelly (Helen Hunt), had given him as a Christmas present may have been what saved his life. For the next four years, he will eke out a life on a tiny rock in the middle of the South Pacific. Sounds like a New Yorker cartoon, or Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, especially in the brilliant Luis Buñuel adaptation.

Hanks, though, is brilliant himself, bringing reserves of irony, wit, and pathos to his ordeal and showing a Chaplinesque knack for physical comedy — which comes in handy since his only interlocutor is a volleyball named Wilson. Zemeckis, too, shows cinematic subtlety in outlining Chuck’s progress from time-obsessed workaholic to bereft primitive to discoverer of such milestones in civilization as edged tools, fire, and religious fetishism. Indeed, Chuck couldn’t have picked a better place to cast away — insect- and bacteria-free and tropically serene, the island hones him into a slim, tanned-and-toned demi-god who looks 10 years younger than when he left. By contrast, the civilization he leaves behind seems phony, like a mediocre movie. That’s the film’s major failing; none of Chuck’s mooning over Kelly matches his anguish when he’s parted from his true friend, Wilson the volleyball.

— Peter Keough