By now, after all the pre-release hype, everybody knows the story.  Tom Hanks gets marooned on a desert island somewhere in the regions of Tahiti or the Cook Islands after his FedEx plane crashes in the ocean.  He spends four 
years hanging on to life, makes a getaway on a makeshift raft, makes it home, and finds that life has changed in four years? including the remarriage of his wife (Helen Hunt).  A story we have seen before.  So we have long awaited the team of Hanks and Robert Zemeckis (who directed Hanks in (Forrest Gump??) to turn it into something special.  They do not.

        This movie is so poorly written, it is hilarious in some spots where it is intended to be most serious.   The characters are flat, cardboard people with two dimensions.  I'm serious when I say that Hanks's pal Wilson is the movie's ONLY well-rounded character, in more ways than one, and he hardly moves a muscle the whole time.  (I say he's assuming something that is not specifically stated in the story or shown, shall we say, cinematographically.)  And the ONLY time Hanks actually weeps is when he loses Wilson at sea.  NOT when he is finally reunited with his wife, the love of my life.  NOT when he is marooned.  NOT when he realizes what he has lost in life and what a fearful predicament he is in.  He only wails for Wilson.  And Wilson doesn't really seem to notice or to care.

        And why is Wilson in this movie at all?  As one of my Chinese friends pointed out, If you're marooned there's nobody to talk to.  But if you're an actor in a movie, you gotta talk to somebody.  You gotta have some dialogue. Hence, Wilson.

        Actually, he loses Wilson once before, temporarily, while he is still on he island, and goes berserk trying to find him again (which he does, of course), splasing around in the surf and rocks.  It reminded me for all the world of the scene in Mel Brooks's BLAZING SADDLES when Harvey Korman, in the bathtub with Slim Pickins scrubbing his back, drops his Rubber Froggy into the suds and goes berserk trying to recover him.  It's that silly.  The difference is with Brooks it's SUPPOSED to be silly.

        The greatest wisdom Hanks can muster out of the whole thing is, You gotta keep breathing.  Well, shucky darn.  Even the Godfather had a better mantra, an offer he can't refuse and all that.  Throughout all of this, Hanks doesn't change.  Monumental events change people.  Life raised to exponential powers modifies us.  Some become morose, some achieve great wisdom.  Some go crazy.  Some buck up.  Some try to commit suicide, and so does Hanks, it turns out, but we ARE DENIED that scene and only told about it in retrospect (not even a flashback).  This is typical of the many bad choices made throughout this movie.

        Another is the supposed difficult relationship between Hanks and a co-worker whose wife is dying of cancer.  Early on,Hanks suggests putting her in touch with a specialist he knows, but the co-worker (for a reason I 
still can't fathom) just sorta turns away quietly.  I never figured out what that was a bad move on his part.  Then, when Hanks gets back after his four years as a castaway, he learns that the co-worker's wife has died, and 
he APOLOGIZES:  I'm sorry I wasn't there for you.  What?!?!  When you're not there for someone because your plane went down in the ocean and marooned you for four years, you don't apologize.  It wasn't your fault, don't you see.  And THIS is what passes in this film for change and insight and redemption.  No, no, no, NO, NO, NO!

        Look at the changes wrought by the Vietnam war in the vets who survived.  But not Hanks.  Maybe at the end he has become a kinder gentler Hanks (at the start he was a mean FedEx man), but that's not enough.  He doesn't find himself or learn anything significant.  "You gotta keep breathing" is not profound.  And would you believe it?Xthe very last scene is a close-up of Hanks with a goofy grin on his face a goofy grin from his early career in "oe and the Volcano" at all. "Happy Trails To You."

        The story has enormous plausibility problems.  Short of breaking any bones or gouging out an eye, Hanks get brutally ripped in the leg by coral, and he removes his own aching tooth with the blade of an ice skate.  He rips open 
the palm of his hand working with makeshift tools.  Through all of this, in all of the septic world he inhabits, he stays wonderfully healthy.  Not even a fever, no gangrene, not even pus.

        I didn't care about this character at all, except for the fact that he is a human being in grave peril.  Mencius says that ANY of us will rush to save a child who has fallen into a well for no other reason than it is a child.  
That's not enough to make a movie not at these prices.  Hanks and Hunt elsewhere two of my favorite actors--labor heroically to wade through this crap, but even good actors can't outwit a thoroughly dumb script.  Hunt was the only bright spot in the profoundly homophobic "AS GOOD AS IT GETS" a few years ago.  She deserves better.

       What should have been a harrowing and ultimately redemptive experience turns out to be grandly boring and derivative.  A much better story that comes instantly to mind is the Toshiro Mifune-Lee Marvin story, "Hell in the Pacific," a stupid title for an excellent movie of some decades ago.  And if you want a really good handling of a marooned story, read Stephen King's "The Dead Zone" (or see the Christopher Walken movie made from it).  There the main character is marooned for many years in a coma after a highway accident, then comes back to life and tries to make a life out of what's left.  The way King works this out is humane, fascinating, tragic, and plausible.  Or read Charles Dickens "A Tale of Two Cities" and learn what it REALLY means to be "recovered from the dead" (in that case, to get out of being a castaway in the Bastille during the French Revolution).

       All as compared with, say, CASTAWAY, which has the dumbest ending in recent memory.  Hanks comes back to life, and of course looks up Hunt, who has remarried and lives in a different house with a different husband and a new 
daughter.  Now where do you go from there?  It's the same dilemma Samuel Clemens faced after he wrote the good half of "Huckleberry Finn" and then didn't know what to do after Jim and Huck got off that raft.  He wrote another half, a stupid half, that kept the novel from becoming THE great American novel.

       So what do Hanks and Hunt DO when they are reunited in this way after four years?  Well, Festus, they talk.  Yup, instead of falling upon each other's necks and sobbing, they talk (after a brief and welcome appearance 
as the new husband by Chris Noth, who used to be a detective on tv's "Law and Order").  And they talk not in rich, anguished, deep conversation, but shallowly, superficially, mechanically.  Then she takes him to the garage where she has (you guessed it) kept his car gassed and in running order, hand him the keys, and he drives away.  But then she yells is name, he back up, screeches the tires, she get in, and they talk.  He's about to drive away with her when she says, "Nate? (is that the character's name I don't even remember), an he finishes the sentence:  "You gotta go home."  So he drives her back into the driveway, and that's the last we see of Helen Hunt.  Throughout all of this, neither of them sheds a single tear, no voice even quivers, there are no "unutterable groanings."  They just talk each other (and us) nearly to death.  Oh, good grief!  Give me a break!  Remember some of the old, bad Richard Burton movies where he just TALKS 
people to death?

      Whose fault is all this?  The screenwriters.  The  coke-sniffers of Hollywood.  Guaranteed that NOBODY who worked on this script has ever had any life-experiences that even remotely approach what these characters are supposed to be experiencing.  Stephen Crane, who had never been a soldier, did better at imagining up the Civil War than these people.

      A few hot licks do not make a good screenplay.  The adage that first-year writing students learn is true:  "Write about what you know."  You can't just IMAGINE being marooned.  You have to have BEEN marooned.  You can't just imagine coming back to life after four years.  You have to have been there in the proverbial trenches.  Writers must know their characters as intimately as they do any human being.  They must know their stories their backgrounds, their favorite foods, their habits in bed and on the toilet, their fantasies, their bank accounts, their dreams everything.  Most of 
this will not make it OVERTLY into the script or onto the screen, but its PRESENCE will be there in the third dimension of each character.

     Three scenes in this dreariness actually rang true for me and will hang in my memory.  The first was the plane crash.  Sound and images combined terrifyingly.  I've had nightmares like this.

     Another was Hanks's building, from raw and makeshift materials, a small voyaging canoe.  It reminded me of the tiny Polynesian voyaging canoes that carried those people halfway around the world on the ocean.  Now THERE was 
some plain old gutsy-ballsy courage.  Those people faced the possibility of becoming marooned every day.  When Hanks launches forth into the incoming surf to try to get shed of his island, and the waves came roaring in (good sound effects, by the way), you got a taste of what those people faced as a way of life.

      The third good scene was when a school (troup, cluster, patch, family, pod what do whales come in?) of whales comes swimming by and one breaches just beside his raft and opens its huge eye to look upon him.  That is 
awesome.  Whales never fail to captivate and charm remember Star Trek IV?  But then even that is turned maudlin.  Days later, as Hanks drifts parched and semi-conscious on the ocean, a mysterious splashing showers him with 
water to (a) warn him that he is about to lose Wilson, and (b) alert him to the approach of the huge cargo ship that will rescue him.  I'm not sure what the splashes are intended to be.  You don't SEE any more whales, but 
you do HEAR what sounds like a huge tail slapping the water.  A sign from God?  A guardian angel?  Why?  The noise of the ship is enough to wake the dead.  What is the point of hiding the visual source of the sound and 
shower?  Is this finally, a spiritual element in the film?  It's too little too late.

       It reminded me for all the world of Ring Lardner's nonsensical little one-act play, "The Tridget of Greva, Translated from the Squinch by Ring Lardner," in which some guys are sitting in a stage-prop boat on stage having a nonsensical Lardneresque conversation while stagehands are seesawing cardboard waves back and forth, side to side, all around the boat. To further destroy any willing suspension of disbelief, one of them asks, 
"Where is that breeze coming from???  Offstage,  the other answers.

       As an example of what I call the "spiritual element" that doesn't get maudlin or soapy, try reading John Grisham's novel, "The Testament."  In it, he redeems a wasted lawyer who describes himself as being "on the brink of spiritual annihilation."  And Grisham does it with such finesse that you hardly notice.

       Finally, at the very end of CASTAWAY, after what seemed like about two weeks in the theater, Hanks is back out on the country road where the movie opened.  He is finally getting to deliver an unopened FedEx package that survived with him on the island.  He takes it to the same farm house where the story began, but no one is there.  He leaves it on the doorstep with a note, "This package saved my life."  In other words, it was the future hope of delivering that package that was his Aristotelian "hypothetical necessity" pointing him forward during the four years.  Do you buy that?  I don't.  Would that have gotten you through?  It wouldn't me.

       When I was teaching literature, I used to tell my students that you can define two very important ideas exactly the same way.  You can define both "drama" and "freedom" as "a series of moral choices."  There are no significant moral choices in this movie.  Even the man's fight against nature is not by choice.  That's one reason I liked the otherwise silly 
"Vertical Limit" better: at least those people chose to go up that mountain.  Faulkner spoke of this when he talked about writers who write stuff that "grieves on no universal bones."  He also said:  "I decline to accept the end of man.  I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail."  This is a movie about endurance.  Period.

       I haven't been so angry at the ending of a movie since Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner broke up, for no damn good reason, at the end of "The Bodyguard."  If you saw that movie, did you ever ask yourself WHY they broke up?  It's like because, man, they RILLY RILLY wanted to use Dolly Parton's song, "I Will Always Love You," and it's about parting, Parton Parting: "I know I'm not what you need..so goodbye, please don't cry..I wish you love and happiness.."  So some Hollywood coke-head sniffed another line and said, Well, geez, man, we gotta make the story MATCH the song.

       There is no redemption here in CASTAWAY, no pity and sacrifice and love and hope, as William Faulkner taught us.  There is no spiritual dimension to life.  Tom Hanks is as pretty as ever at the end.  Not a scratch on body or 
soul.  One way or another, most people in foxholes somehow call upon some God, weep for help, turn themselves inside out.  Their hearstrings get wrenched.  Not Hanks or Hunt.  At the end, it seems Hanks may actually decide to pursue a cowgirl chickie in a pickup.  Could be Winslow, Arizona:

It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford Slowin?? down to take a look at me.

Yee-haw!

       In his book, "On Moral Fiction," John Gardner asks, why is it we return again and again to stories (books, movies, tv shows, plays)?  Why do we collect them and rerun them?  It's the pleasure of finding people there we love.  I found nobody to love in CASTAWAY.  Nobody I really cared about.  Nobody I would like to get to know, keep as a friend, visit their home, buy pancakes for in the morning.  As another of my Chinese friends said over dim 
sum after the movie, "They just wanted to make a movie to get an award."

       And they have.  Tom Hanks won the Golden Globe, which probably means he will get the Oscar.  And the movie will probably glean several others, maybe even Best Picture.  But this is not on the level of his character in 
"Philadelphia" or of Forrest Gump.  Not, as they say in Boulder, Nevada, by a dam site.
 

Bob