Cast Away You Can Count on Me: Stranded in the wilds of the South Pacific and the wilds of upstate New York
Cooper, Rand Richards
Rand Richards Cooper SURVIVORS 'Cast Away' & 'You Can Count on Me' Director Robert Zemeckis has made all sorts of films in his charmed career—offbeat comedies (Used Cars), thrillers (What...
...It gives us people in their wholeness, acting on mixed motives, riding the daily rollercoaster of hopes, regrets, spats, and plain old goofs...
...These tactics are very effective, but they also damage the fabric of our system...
...but beneath the surface lies a long-suppressed instinct for stirring the pot...
...In cultural warfare, the stakes seem that great and call for extraordinary exertion that sometimes crosses the bounds of civility and lawfulness...
...After Bush became president-elect, Rush Limbaugh angrily dismissed suggestions that Republicans should turn away from an "orgy of hate" to seek conciliation and pursue moderation...
...It's a big gamble, putting this much on a volleyball, and it pays off, the very grotesqueness of the emotions delineating our irrepressible human need for love and company...
...His life isn't a tragedy...
...Noland is too busy to worry much about a colleague whose wife is battling cancer...
...Samantha works hard to keep things running, and to be fair and polite...
...Mark Ruffalo's Terry is sulky and self-righteous, and thoroughly infuriating...
...Laura Linney resembles a cross between Meryl Streep and Renee ZeUweger, and emotions play rapidly across her handsome, protean face...
...Terry is the eternal adolescent, an impetuous, abrasive pothead who makes a mess of everything...
...Ice skates, you think, how useless on a tropical island, how ironic, until your eye wanders to the blades...
...Hanks tenders his usual terrific work...
...There was something frightening about the bullyboy tactics of the imported demonstrators and the consistent liberties that Baker and his surrogates took with the truth...
...For comedy, there's Sam visiting her minister, writhing in guilt about having two lovers and cheating on both, only to discover that the minister doesn't believe in sin...
...but where's the fun...
...Rand Richards Cooper SURVIVORS 'Cast Away' & 'You Can Count on Me' Director Robert Zemeckis has made all sorts of films in his charmed career—offbeat comedies (Used Cars), thrillers (What Lies Beneath), slick adventures (Romancing the Stone), and megahits (Forrest Gump...
...What is it, exactly, that a small movie like this feels like...
...The film keeps subtly shifting us from irony to urgency...
...Then there's the ballyhooed physical transformation...
...Like life...
...But if it seems bewildered, like Noland himself, by the return to civilization, we nevertheless feel sufficiently harrowed by now to credit the haunted look on Hanks's face...
...This mindset seemed to legitimize in29 (Continued from page 29) timidating black voters, doctoring absentee ballot applications in Seneca and Martin Counties, the reckless purging of voter rolls to reduce the number of black voters, and the stonewalling of the Florida secretary of state's office...
...The politics of resentment created something almost akin to what Adorno called the authoritarian personality...
...Zemeckis is not a director known for making his audiences uncomfortable, and doing so here elevates his film to a new level...
...Noland's stay on the island lasts more than four years, and Zemeckis shot Cast Away with a year break in the middle, to allow Hanks to shrink three body sizes and grow a tangled, leonine mane and beard...
...It allows sympathetic characters a nasty impulse and obnoxious ones a moment of shaky grace, and discovers joys and sorrows triggered not by grand events, but innocuous ones, like how your little boy, angry at you, pours a whole bottle of maple syrup all over his plate and ruins your morning...
...Lonergan, a playwright, has a fine ear for dialogue and a feel for sibling drama—how hope springs eternal, and disappointment too...
...Her on-again-offagain boyfriend, Bob, is a handsome dud...
...Scottsville, New York, isn't as isolated as a Pacific island...
...Twenty years later, Samantha is a harried single mom, Terry a troubled drifter...
...The film's flashy opening follows a package delivered from an isolated Texas crossroads halfway round the globe to Moscow—brisk strokes that orchestrate action and exposition, set up character, and foreshadow events to come...
...On the other hand, they uniformly defended the conduct of the congressional staffers and others sent to Florida to stop the recount...
...when she calls him and asks, "What are you wearing right now...
...While you may not always like his material, Zemeckis's command of the medium is masterly, and never more so than in Cast Away, his retelling of the Robinson Crusoe fable, starring Tom Hanks as Chuck Noland, a FedEx manager whose hubris lands him marooned on a Pacific island...
...Samantha, meanwhile, spends her days doggedly keeping the family house spic-and-span, managing her cute eight-year-old-son, Rudy (Rory Culkin), and dealing with her blandly overbearing new boss (Matthew Broderick) at the bank...
...and once she gets going, her life veers pleasingly out of control, in a way Lonergan makes clear is probably good for her...
...Steep hills and valleys, a main street with a few side spurs to nowhere: if s the kind of town where the vast spaces between tables in a restaurant remind you that upstate New York more closely resembles Alaska than Manhattan...
...The FedEx cargo jet Noland's riding in goes down in a mammoth storm over the Pacific...
...Among marquee actors he has a matchless gift for inwardness...
...You haven't seen anyone throw the javelin this accurately since Rafer Johnson...
...What looks like an ad for Fedex is really a bravura critique of the new world order, with FedEx an empire flying its purple and orange colors, and Noland its Patton, haranguing glum conscripts about what a shipshape new office he's going to run Efficiency is Noland's mantra, and the arrogance of his pep talk, its snappy brutality, can't be missed...
...Well, but maybe not this much...
...She needs a dash of her brother, just as he needs a dose of her...
...Cast Away doesn't quite know what 18 to do when it leaves the island...
...The columns of several highly respected Republican pundits read like James Baker's press statements...
...Without being heavy-handed, Lonergan sketches symmetrical brother-andsister responses to the shared family trauma...
...Zemeckis wisely leaves open the question of whether Noland will be better off for having been made to face his own helpless humanity...
...Noland may be a nice enough guy, but being nice is what he does in his spare time...
...On the island, he shows how Noland's bellowing rage at his helplessness yields to giddy euphoria at finally mastering fire...
...he answers with a nervous, "Mom...
...The GOP chairperson of one Florida county told the New York Times that "our lives" were at stake...
...it's a commercial...
...His career is swallowing him up, but Zemeckis and his screenwriter, William Broyles Jr., let us know that Noland likes it that way...
...Paged away from a family Christmas dinner in Memphis, he rushes to catch a cargo flight across the Pacific, hurriedly presenting a ring-sized box to his fiancee, Kelly (Helen Hunt...
...FedEx packages wash up as well, and Noland opens them...
...You Can Count on Me is a determinedly small movie...
...Nearby, in a hillside graveyard, lie the parents of Samantha (Laura Linney) and Terry Prescott (Mark Ruffalo), killed in a car accident when Sam and Terry were kids...
...But then he does something to redeem himself, and in spite of yourself you start to like him, at least until his next blunder...
...You Can Count on Me is a feast for its two lead actors...
...The environment has remorselessly, efficiently shaped him— and lent a nifty new skill set, too...
...She smiles, she copes...
...From here on, Cast Away abjures music in favor of the wind and the rain and the ceaseless crash of waves, and Don Burgess's camera, panning from atop the island's highest point, captures the magnificent inhumanity of nature...
...He noted that it was anger that finally brought the party control of the presidency and both houses of Congress...
...I'll be right back," he says to Kelly, and you find yourself wishing something would happen to mess him up a little...
...Confident, talented, brash, he's an avatar of American triumphalism—the indispensable person in the indispensable nation, who can do Christmas, propose to his girlfriend, and jet off to fix another glitch in the global consumer circuitry...
...he wants to understand...
...Most alarming, their treatment of Jesse Jackson's orderly protests seemed to suggest that any time an African American speaks forcefully about civil rights concerns to other blacks a riot has taken place...
...It's funny, in a daily, utterly real way...
...19 (Continued from page 4) passions to win political support...
...Watching a film like this is like reading a good contemporary realist novel or short story...
...Their tender, tempestuous reunion forms the subject of Kenneth Lonergan's superb debut film, You Can Count on Me...
...it just feels like it...
...As for his other gear, one of the washed-up FedEx packages yields a volleyball, which, with a face painted in Noland's own blood, becomes his talisman and companion, which he names Wilson (after the brand name...
...don swift Erie, Pa...
...Meanwhile, Noland's desperate struggle to learn survival skills jolts us from our usual valuings of things...
...at sunrise he washes up, a lone survivor on a tiny deserted island...
...he can barely pause for his own personal life...
...At first you think Zemeckis is just being cute, but the interaction deepens gradually, culminating in Noland's choked remorse when in anger he hurls the ball into raging surf, then goes plunging after it, wailing, "Never again, Wilson...
...When the corpse of one of the pilots washes up two days after the crash, there's anguish and horror, but a small inner voice exulting, "Shoes...
...Suspense consists in wondering whether unreliable Terry will pick Rudy up from school as promised, and pathos in watching him bury himself in a Gameboy while Samantha tries to spill her heart out...
Vol. 128 • January 2001 • No. 2
