Well, there are days when you’re happy just pottering around the house doing nothing, and then there are days when you need to spend two hours alone with Tom Hanks.
Today was one of those days.
A mere fifteen years after Back to the Future, which seemed like an eternity when I was a kid, Robert Zemeckis released the third, and I assume final, instalment in his “fish out of water” trilogy, following Romancing in the Stone and the aforementioned Back to the Future. I didn’t watch Cast Away at the time, as I could sort-of see the movie play out in my head. A stranded-on-an-island movie threatened to be as predictable as a prison drama or biopic. Also, based on the trailer alone, it just seemed like a 2 hour advertisement for a well-known courier firm. However, in the 24 years since its release, I kept noticing references to Cast Away in popular culture, to the point where the film began to plague my tiny mind.
Okay, “plague” is perhaps rather extreme, but you get what I mean.
So, yes, today was the day. I finally managed to get a solid night’s sleep last night, and within sensible hours. Fingers crossed this means my sleep pattern is back to a healthy “normal”. While I really have nowhere to be, sleeping during the day does start to weigh on you after awhile. Basically, sitting down to Cast Away, with a much-needed clear head, was my way of celebrating.
Regardless of the stranded-on-an-island cliches, the film really seems to be about the cruelty of hindsight, the burden of predictability, and the terrifying randomness of life. I’ve found myself questioning every major decision I’ve ever made in my life, dwelling on where that decision has taken me and how my life is apparently worse for it. But, like the predictability of a biopic, the quality of our experiences tend to fluctuate. Bad decisions can lead to good experiences. Eventually. Some people form religions around this key theme in life, thinking that an invisible space wizard meant for the good things to happen, even if it took hundreds of years and millions of innocent lives.
The truth is, shit happens, so you might as well just crack on with life and hope something positive swings round eventually. To quote Cast Away itself: “Who knows what the tide could bring?”. Such an encouraging sentiment can work for me on most days but, if you suffer from clinical depression, your mind can also conspire to be utterly unmoved by such simple platitudes. I personally have bouts of feeling positive and just get on with life, whereas sometimes I’ll be swamped by a physically-draining negativity, unable to get out of bed or stay sober. Perhaps I should keep Cast Away nearby, just for the latter.
Overall, I found the film a little frustrating to watch. Tom Hanks’ character was very unsympathetic, which is why I assume they cast the eminently-likeable Tom Hanks. I get that him being unsympathetic was absolutely the point at the start, but he fails to become sympathetic as he endures his predicament. I was fine with him starting off “busy businessman too busy to not be busy”, I get it, but the film seems to depict an intelligent, resourceful man with no imagination or empathy towards other human beings just get a little bored for awhile. Maybe that was the point too, since being alone on an island would make you incredibly hardened and self-serving, but I still would have liked a scene where he shows some trauma for having been in a plane crash and seeing a bunch of people die. But he never does. It wouldn’t have taken long, just one short scene, but it’s just not there.
Did they forget?
Still, Hanks’ natural charm kept me engaged, even though I disliked his character. I mean, he’s surrounded by small creatures that he could keep as a pet, and yet he chooses to befriend an inanimate object. While I’m a lifelong arachnophobe, I still would have made friends with a crab first. This bolstered my belief that Hanks’ character was truly dead inside, so why should I give a shit about him?
I didn’t, which is a fundamental problem I had with Cast Away.
Even though the film tries to explain his logic, I still couldn’t grasp why Hanks would leave his safe little island and venture out onto the rough sea aboard a rickety raft. Flying into outer space in just a pair of speedos would probably pose fewer dangers to a person. Just stay where you are, I’m sure eventually someone will turn up for leisure purposes or scientific curiosity.
Again, the script does try to address this issue, but never satisfyingly enough.
What the film lacks in logic, it makes up for with emotion in the final reel. While we inexplicably miss the first 4 months of Hanks being back in civilisation, the depiction of him unable to carry on with the life he left behind is very relatable, and his deep feeling of loss is very close to my own experiences. My ex-girlfriend and best friend died a couple of years ago, which I am still struggling to come to terms with. The cruelty of hindsight bothers me on an hourly basis. As with Hanks’ character regretting not staying in the car with Helen Hunt, so do I regret not replying to my friend’s final text message to me, as I was giving her the cold-shoulder at the time, for what seem like now to be very petty reasons. Ever since, I find myself wondering whether, had I just replied to her, it would have given her heart the strength not to fail. This is, of course, egotistical nonsense, but I guess it’s what a person does when they’re grieving.
She used to have really bad panic attacks and call for me when I was in another room, which used to freak me out at the time. Now it’s all I want to hear.
Unfortunately, I’m still stuck on my little island, without the skills to build a raft or brave enough to venture out into the ocean. I’m stuck here on this antisocial behaviour order colony of a council estate for life, it seems.
But who knows what the tide could bring.
And, yes, Cast Away is a 2 hour advertisement for that well-known courier firm.
Do stay in touch, darlings.
Toodles!
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