Cast away awards4/15/2023 The screenplay's conceptual master stroke has Chuck revert to childhood through the creation of an imaginary companion so he can survive psychically. Even at moments of maximum stress, the qualities that shine through are an infectious spontaneity, curiosity, ebullience and native optimism, along with an instinctive common-sense resourcefulness. Hanks's likability has everything to do with the ease with which he pours the childlike side of himself into his performances. If his wound-up, globe-trotting character, who early in the film is shown haranguing Russian employees at a FedEx depot in Moscow, isn't exactly like you and me in his background and tastes (he happens to be an Elvis Presley fanatic), he embodies enough parts of other people to be utterly recognizable. Hanks portrays a spirited Everyman, at once deeply likable and profoundly ordinary. Ultimate isolation, the movie reminds us, doesn't have a soundtrack except what the environment churns up along with the ringing in our ears, our heartbeats and the voices chattering in our minds. Hanks are the grunts and howls of a man exerting himself to stay alive against a backdrop of the roaring ocean and the wind eerily whistling outside the cave Chuck adopts as a shelter. The most devastating sequences, instead of flooding us with music, suspend the soundtrack and forgo even language to allow the sounds of nature to take over. It also knows when to turn down the volume. ''Cast Away'' also has its quotient of technological trickery, but one of the movie's wonders is that everything looks and feels so remarkably real. The earlier film huffed and puffed to evoke a similarly elemental struggle in the traditional Hollywood ways, with strenuously grandiose music and oversize, patently unrealistic computer-generated special effects. ''Cast Away'' is everything this year's other man-against-nature blockbuster, ''The Perfect Storm,'' was not. The center of the film is an unforgettably gripping, heart-in-your-throat evocation of the unbearable loneliness and terror of ultimate abandonment once its hero, stranded and presumed dead, gives up hope of being rescued but still clings tenaciously to life. At its best, ''Cast Away,'' like ''Titanic,'' awes us with its sheer oceanic sweep and its cosmic apprehension of human insignificance. But even in the wobbly narrative bookends that hold a love story, interrupted by disaster, there are flashes of a deeper metaphysical poignancy. Back on the mainland, however, it turns more formulaic and corny. When ''Cast Away'' is the farthest from civilization, it is as compelling a cinematic adventure as any Hollywood has produced. Just in time for dinner, however, we're whisked back to safety and to tables piled high with supermarket goodies and a life that oddly and sadly seems banal and superfluous compared to what has gone before. We remain stranded there just long enough to be given a deep, salty gulp of what it's like to have to restart civilization from scratch. With a bravura mastery of tone and timing, ''Cast Away'' sweeps us out to sea and washes us ashore on a tiny deserted island in the Pacific. And in the heart-stopping ocean and desert-island scenes that constitute the core of ''Cast Away,'' Tom Hanks, in collaboration with the director Robert Zemeckis and the screenwriter William Broyles Jr., bring those visions thrillingly and hauntingly to life. It's like standing on the edge of a cliff and imagining that fatal leap into the unknown. WHICH of us, while sitting at the edge of the ocean and gazing toward the horizon, hasn't shivered to imagine being drawn out to sea, getting lost and ending up a tiny forgotten speck in the middle of nowhere, shouting at the sky? As potentially panic-inducing as this vision may be, there's also something alluring about it.
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