Lost and Found. - Review - movie review

National Review, Feb 5, 2001 by John Simon

Tom Hanks is the kind of beloved actor who can make a retardate look like a prince, and a smartass seem lovable. In Cast Away (why two words instead of one?), he is Chuck Noland, a fervent FedEx engineer whom we watch plying his efficiency-fanaticism in Moscow and the American heartland, and who, when a FedEx plane crashes-rather more spectacularly than any previous movie plane crash-ends up as a castaway on an uninhabited South Pacific island. Chuck's beloved speed no longer exists, and time stands nightmarishly still. Dedicated actor that he is, Hanks dieted away a good chunk of his avoirdupois during a year-long break in the filming while the director, Robert Zemeckis, went off to make another movie. The struggles of a shipwrecked (well, plane-wrecked) man are scrupulously conveyed in the main part of the film, including the relentless, monotonous sound of wind and waves, which the soundtrack lets us endure with minimal edulcoration by music.

The English classics of shipwreck are, of course, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and, for the dramatic return of the stranded sailor, Tennyson's Enoch Arden. The movie harks back to both. It is, as it were, in three acts: before, during, and after the island. Though by far the best, even the long middle part has its problems. Film needs dialogue (at least since the invention of sound) and can sustain silence and interior monologue only so long. True, Chuck has the picture of his girlfriend, Kelly, whom he foolishly just missed getting engaged to, inside the cover of the family-heirloom pocket watch she gave him, to emote to. Depending largely on whatever FedEx packages the surf washes ashore, he also has a pair of girls' ice skates (with which he extracts a tormenting tooth in one of the film's most harrowing scenes), some video tape (with whose help he'll build a raft), and a white volleyball (on which he paints a face with his blood). He dubs it Wilson, after the manufacture's name, and converses with it, but volleyballs don't have much conversation.

Cast Away is good about the slow and painful discovery of edibles, tools, fire, etc., as well as about the frustrated escape attempts and other setbacks. There is, however, a certain cuteness about William Broyles Jr.'s script, Zemeckis's direction, and Hanks's acting. The "Four Years Later" title, which allows the film to jump from Chuck's first weeks on the island to his last, is also a bit of an evasion, and Chuck's escape on that homemade raft is a trifle too good to be true.

The real trouble, though, is the last part. Both what happens with Kelly (although the ubiquitous Helen Hunt gives yet another of her fine performances) and what happens without her are sweaty efforts for a not-too-sweet and not-too-bitter ending, and make strained-for veracity feel factitious. And how can we possibly worry about such a darling of the gods and the public as Tom Hanks?

-- Want to know how dishonest, preposterous, and stupid a Hollywood movie can get? Let me commend to you Finding Forrester. It concerns a reclusive white novelist, William Forrester, and a young black high-school student, Jamal Wallace, in the South Bronx. Forrester is a bird watcher from his window (how many rarae aves, other than himself, frequent the South Bronx?), and so also observes Jamal and his pals playing basketball on a public court below.

Curious about the man in the window, Jamal infiltrates his apartment, and discovers that he is the mysterious William Forrester, who disappeared after his first and only triumph, the Pulitzer-winning Avalon Landing, which happens to be a favorite of Jamal's. Besides excelling at basketball, the boy is a closet writer, and his notebook is in the backpack he happens to forget in Forrester's sprawling, book-filled apartment. Needless to say, the kid's writing, though untutored, is brilliant, and Forrester decides to mentor the budding genius.

From here, the film proceeds by leaps and bounds (and slam dunks) to ever greater absurdities. Jamal is picked up by a fancy Upper East Side prep school, Mailor-Callow (why not Callow Mailer?), where he shines as a scholar and athlete. He charms a fellow student named Claire, the white, liberal daughter of a rich board member, into a sort of platonic love affair (the movie is too gutless for anything more), but invites the envy of the lit teacher, Professor Crawford, sarcastic with all students and vicious with Jamal.

Crawford would not be tolerated at such a school, and the way the obnoxious F. Murray Abraham plays this failed writer jealous of Jamal's talent makes things even more ludicrously unbelievable. The scene in which Crawford throws esoteric quotations from English literature at Jamal, only to have the boy identify all of them with lightning speed, would make the smartest quiz kid turn green. The very classroom, shot in a Jesuit-school library with precious tomes on open shelves, is laughably unconvincing, with its back wall displaying portraits of "the world's great writers." These, in case you didn't know, are Poe, Thoreau, Melville, Cooper, Henry James, Louisa May Alcott, T. S. Eliot, and, next to him, William Forrester. Missing only are Albert Payson Terhune and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. The movie, awful enough to be savaged even in the usually namby-pamby New York Times, was written by one Mike Rich. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Oregon, he has been a news anchor on various Oregon radio stations. During an interview with a writer touching on Salinger and Pynchon, both famous recluses, the idea for the movie was born. Though, to be sure, both Salinger and Pynchon needed more than one successful publication to establish themselves, and even so they did not quite make it onto the Mailor-Callow wall of honor.