I really have a soft spot for Crusoe alone on an island theme movies. There is just something deep down in the oldest parts of the brain´s survival parts, that is triggered by being in a scenario like that. The notion that the ideas of civilization, economics, society, politcs are nullified, are strong drivers for this theme. Cast Away brings things up to date and puts an ordinary, modern man, spending most of his time optimizing the use of time, into this timeless character.
Tom Hanks is a FedEx engineer, who is obsessed with his work. Time is everything in his life and his marriage is suffering a bit from it, but his wife is overbearing and enables his behavior. Over christmas, he is compelled to do even more work. But during a flight out of course, he crash lands in the pacific ocean and floats a shore on a deserted island, as the lone survivor. His time on the island is split in two parts. The first months, trying to figure out how to survive with what he has got. The second part is 4 years later, when he has learned how to survive, and is planning his "escape" by a raft. The fourth part is, and i presume this is not really a spoiler, about his return to "civilization".
Hanks is phenomenally good here. He is now the state of the art of the Crusoe character and the standard by which future movies, with the same theme, will be measured. The amount of classic scenes he produces here is astounding. And if that was not enough, he actually take a long break during filming, between the two parts on the island, so that he has time to loose 30 pounds, let his hair and beard gro wildly and get fit. He is literally transformed physically to make the four year fast forward to the second part of the island story plausible. Very impressive. His loneliness and bordering paranoia is visualized by him talking to a volleyball, which among other, more or less useful stuff from the plane, drifts ashore. He paints a face on it to make it look human. When he looses it later on the raft, he genuinely looks broken and sad.
Except for spelling out his dependance on controlling time a bit too much in the first part, this is a very balanced film. Hanks has a rare ability to act the ordinary guy very convincingly, and yet still be interesting. That is the perfect balance that the director and Hanks together manages to strike. Chuck Nolan, as the character is called, knows already that he has to start a new life when he comes back. He is still on an island, though much larger and populated with human beings. But his old life is an island he has left behind. This is a transition and feeling that no other movie that i am aware of, manages to convey so powerful. A unique movie.
Rating: 10/10