It's a shame that two of the year's best films were ruined by a promotional trailer that gave away too much of both stories.  It's an even bigger shame that both movies were directed by the same person - Robert Zemeckis.  Is it a coincidence? Beats me.  What is known is that his previous film, What Lies Beneath, took nearly an hour-and-a-half to reveal plot points that the trailer showed months before the film was released. So much for the red herring in that one.

Cast Away offers more of the same shenanigans.  The two-minute preview shows a plane crashing into the Pacific Ocean and its lone survivor washing up on the shores of a deserted island.  He has to rough it – Lord of the Flies style – but eventually makes it home, much to the surprise of his friends and family, who all assume he died in the crash.

So why would anybody want to venture out into the cold and spend money to sit in a dark room to watch a film whose ending is no secret?  The answer is simple – Tom Hanks.  People seem to like the guy an awful lot, and he acts his ass off in Cast Away, where he plays Chuck Noland, a slightly puffy Memphis-based Federal Express employee who spends most of his time on the road training international branches of his company.

Cast Away opens with several scenes that don't seem necessary but play a vital role in the film's final reel.  The first act sets up Chuck's hectic life and relationship with girlfriend Kelly (Helen Hunt, Pay it Forward).  It's Christmas Day, and Chuck gets a page to jet off to Tahiti, postponing a planned proposal to Kelly until New Year's Eve.  "I'll be right back," he tells her, but we all know better.

The plane crash is as intense as anything you've seen lately, especially if you've been watching election coverage on CNN.  Because Chuck's pilot flew 200 miles off course to avoid a storm (which also conveniently left the craft unable to make radio contact with the ground), any search efforts made won't be anywhere near his new island home.

On the island, Chuck has to abandon his "live and die by the clock" lifestyle in favor of finding things like food, water and shelter.  Before long, he's doing fire dances, painting on cave walls and searching the sky for clues about the tide, just like our knuckle-dragging, monosyllabic forefathers (and I don't mean the Bush family).  This isn't your typical Hollywood deserted island, either.  There are no drug farmers (like The Beach), no headhunters (like Gilligan's Island) and no naked fat guys (like ... you know).

Chuck is kept alive by the contents of several packages from the FedEx crash that wash up on the shore of his island, one of which provides the castaway his only friend and confidant - a volleyball he calls "Wilson" (which I'd have eaten - leather is as close to steak as you'd get on a deserted island).  This middle part of Cast Away is over an hour long and features no music and very little dialogue (the least in a film this length since The Thin Red Line).  It's all Hanks, and he does a very admirable job.

Zemeckis pulls off his best directorial effort yet, and that's quite a statement considering the films he already has under his belt.  He mixes in a bunch of the long tracking shots that we've come to expect, and the transitions between his scenes are typically amazing, but the director makes his greatest contribution to Cast Away by leaving important pieces of the story out of the film.  Scenes that you expect to see are missing, but he's a strong enough storyteller to fill in the blanks in other ways.  He even mounts a camera to a FedEx package to show its delivery journey.  Now, if we can just get somebody to edit Zemeckis' trailers a little more carefully, he'll be in business.

Hanks may also have reached his career zenith with his performance in Cast Away.  After all, not just any actor can carry a film with this little action and dialogue.  Much has been made of Hanks' weight gain and loss for the film (it was filmed in two segments so he could lose several dozen pounds), but his physical appearance takes a backseat to his acting, which is quite smashing considering his costar was a volleyball.  If you put Joaquin Phoenix on an island with only a round piece of leather, nothing remotely exciting would happen.

And what's with poor Helen Hunt?  She was in one of the biggest blockbusters ever (Twister) and won an Oscar (As Good as it Gets) while she appeared on television's Mad About You.  Since abandoning the sitcom (which she did, presumably, to make films), she's spun her wheels with strong performances in shaky projects like Dr. T and the Women and Forward.  Now, Hunt has finally found a film to match her acting ability, and she's barely in it.

2:13 –

for intense action sequences and some disturbing images