There really is never a good time to suffer the experience of the dramatic ordeal that befell Chuck Noland and Kelly Frears in the Robert Zemeckis film Cast Away (2000). To borrow from the movie title, what would you choose to cast away in order to survive? When is it appropriate to decide to move on with your life, in a sense casting away the love that means everything?
The human experience of survival and the actions one takes to feel whole and move on are central themes of the movie Cast Away. Chuck Noland, as portrayed by Tom Hanks, is introduced to the audience as focusing on the importance of managing time in order to manage the core relationships with customers of Federal Express (or FedEx). After learning ways this is applied, we learn that Noland and love interest Kelly Frears, as portrayed by Helen Hunt, also feel quite seriously about one another and their respective careers.
It is after Frears and Noland exchange sentimental gifts at what turns into their last Christmas holiday together as a couple that Noland boards a FedEx transport plane that goes terribly wrong. Rather than making its destination, the flight experiences something catastrophic that makes Noland a castaway on a remote, uninhabited island greatly off course from the planned course of the plane. Much of the movie Cast Away deals in the specifics of Noland’s survival on an island in the Pacific Ocean, holding on to the love he has for Frears to keep him motivated to keep going.
The experience of being on a remote island and surviving this ordeal, while maintaining humanity coupled with a sense of normalcy without human relationships is real. A Wilson Sporting Goods volleyball is given a face to assist Noland in the more than four years that he faces as stranded on the island without the benefit of that human contact. Whether Noland survives, along with the relationship developed by Kelly Frears with Jerry Lovett, as portrayed by Chris Noth, develop while Noland is lost and presumed dead. Nick Searcy as as Stan also grieves the loss of his close friend.
Cast Away closes its story a compelling manner that leaves a positive emotional outcome feeling of hope despite what is both an experience of loss, grief, survival and physical and temporal distances of separation that lasts a period of years. Writing this review during a pandemic that calls for the notion of social distancing, physical separation, and personal separation that in some respects mirrors the themes raised in Cast Away amplifies the meaningful weight this film. I rate Cast Away at 4.25-stars on a scale of one-to-five.
Matt – Saturday, September 26, 2020
Matt Lynn Digital 