I'm happy to report the movie improves after that -- but how could it not? Tom Hanks plays a Fed Ex manager whose cargo plane crashes somewhere in the South Pacific; he's the only survivor, and he washes up on a desert island with nothing but the clothes on his back and the items he scavenges from Fed Ex packages that wash up on the beach (which made me feel like I should be FedExing packages crammed with food, water, flashlights, batteries, blankets, matches, and other essentials to Asia every week... just in case). Much has been made of how there's almost no dialogue while he's on the island, but I wouldn't know about that because the people behind me talked the whole time. They'd be great to have on a desert island, because they figured out exactly what to do a millisecond before Hanks did and helpfully shared that information with him. They identified for him everything that he encountered: "water," "coconut," "big wave," "crab," and so forth. They also shared his pain, empathetically yelping, "Ouch!" or "That hurts!" whenever he sustained one of his numerous gory injuries. At one point they let him fend for himself while they discussed where to go for lunch after the movie, which I didn't think was very helpful to Tom at all, and it's only by the grace of god that he got off that island without their help.
The movie's at its best when he's on the island. The plane crash is terrifyingly well staged, and the most effective sequence of the movie is his raft ride from the wreckage of the plane to the island: it's nighttime with a violent storm raging, and in between lightning flashes, the screen is pitch black. Just as he would, you get only fragmented glimpses of his situation. It's absorbing watching him try to adapt to life without even basic shelter, food, or water, and the detailed attention paid to these efforts makes it feel like even more of a cheat to suddenly see a subtitle on the screen: "Four Years Later." Wow. Where does the time go? I didn't think I'd buy soft, mild Tom Hanks as a castaway, but he's quite good. He's very convincing in a rather tricky relationship with a volleyball that he comes to regard as a companion; it would be easy to make it look silly or strained, but he pulls it off.
Unfortunately, the movie is bookended by Hanks' life at home with dullard girlfriend Helen Hunt, about whom the less said the better (why couldn't she have been the one stranded on a desert island? In fact, why can't we load Keanu Reeves, Minnie Driver, and Andie MacDowell into some equivalent of the S.S. Minnow and send them off to some remote island? Among the three of them, they've got maybe half a brain, so they might survive. We could let them off from time to time only to play, respectively, Ted, an animated character's voice, and a piece of furniture). As you might expect from the team that brought you Forrest Gump, these scenes are sappy and predictable. Like we didn't get the point after two hours, Hanks delivers a speech about persevering through adversity and never giving up. And director Robert Zemeckis actually digs up one of the most hackneyed, hoary devices in the history of cinema: the emotional reunion scene in the pouring rain. Right on its heels, he uses yet another cliché: having Hanks stand at a literal crossroads while trying to figure out what to do with his life. And those are just the final -- and most egregious -- two in a movie littered with them.
This is by no means one of the best of the year, but it's a lot better than I expected.
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