I stayed alive, I kept breathing, and one day that logic was proven all wrong because the tide came in, gave me a sail. I had to keep breathing, even though there was no reason to hope, and all my logic said that I would never see this place again. I knew, somehow, that I had to stay alive. That’s when this feeling came over me like a warm blanket. I couldn’t even kill myself the way I wanted to. ![]() And the weight of the log snapped the limb of the tree. So I made a rope, and I went up to the summit to hang myself. The only choice I had, the only control, was when and how and where it was going to happen. Maybe I was going to get sick, or injured. I added it up, knew that I had lost her, because I was never going to get off that island. Kelly added it all up, knew she had to let me go. Here’s a clip (I can’t include the whole thing for copyright reasons, but you can see in this excerpt that even Tom Hanks struggles to deliver his lines like a human):įull transcript: We both had done the math (sic). This is a nice enough touch that conveys the impact of his loss.īut every line that comes out of Chuck’s mouth for the next three minutes is utter garbage of one kind or another. Immediately after Kelly steps out of Chuck’s car and goes back into her house, we find him at his friend Stan’s house by the fire, wrapped in a towel and nursing a stiff drink, looking more like an ordeal survivor than at any point so far. It’s the storyteller entrusting the audience with end of the story.īut this pleasingly open-ended conclusion just makes the preceding, second to last scene all the more perplexing. An ambiguous ending is like a narrative party bag for the audience to take away and enjoy. We don’t know which way he’s going to choose when the end credits arrive, and this is how it should be. At the end of the film Chuck could take one of two roads – he could go to the sculptor’s house (romance) or he could carry on ahead (adventure). Down one road lives a sculptor, whose unopened parcel Chuck has been protecting for four years as an identity-sustaining symbol of his link to his old life of quotidian dependability. ![]() The film begins and ends with a shot of the same crossroads. But then she remembers that she has a kid with the dentist. As he’s driving away she follows him out into the rain, calls him back, kisses him, tells him he’s the love of her life, gets into the passenger seat. In the third to last scene he visits her at home to retrieve his old car. Unfortunately, when he arrives home he discovers that his fiancee Kelly has left him for a dentist, having assumed that he was dead, or at least indefinitely unavailable. ![]() ![]() Somehow, despite his raft taking such a severe battering that an astonished whale actually surfaces to gawk at his predicament, he ends up being rescued by the crew of a liner and taken home. However, even though it’s great, Cast Away is almost undone by its three-minute long penultimate scene.īefore we get to that, let’s recap the main points of the film.Ĭhuck has been right through the shit, surviving a plane crash, a self-administered dental extraction, a suicide attempt, and then four years of solitude before setting out on a flimsy raft to face almost certain death on the Pacific. Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis know how to tell a story. At one point the character Tom Hanks is portraying (Chuck Nolan) suffers a total mental breakdown because a ball is too far away, and the scene in which this happens is devastating, rather than, as you might expect based on that description alone, funny and confusing. In some ways it’s a miracle that Cast Away manages to be entertaining and moving despite featuring only one actor (Tom Hanks) for most of its running time. Cast Away (2000) is a film about a relatively fat, engaged man who ends up stranded on a remote tropical island, makes friends with a volleyball, loses a lot of weight, and finally makes his way home on a raft only to discover that he’s no longer engaged, and in addition is no longer friends with a volleyball.
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