text: And your one luxury item is...
  Some desert island castaways choose a piano or golf clubs to take with them. Others have a TV crew recording their every move. All Tom Hanks gets when he's washed up is a volleyball called Wilson
  Sun 14 Jan 2001 18.24 EST
  From Shakespeare's The Tempest and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to William Golding's Lord of the Flies and the 1964 science-fiction movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars, writers have been intrigued by the notion of people cast ashore on desert islands. Audiences share this fascination and every week since Roy Plomley devised Desert Island Discs in 1942 several million listeners have tuned in to hear how various celebrities would cope with loneliness and privation, and what eight gramophone records they'd take with them to ease the pain.
  The latest exercise in the Crusoe genre is Cast Away, which reunites Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks, the director and star of Forrest Gump, which was, of course, an updating of another eighteenth-century moral fiction, Voltaire's Candide.
  Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a workaholic FedEx systems engineer who spends his time flying around the world trying to make his company's parcel delivery service faster than that of its rivals. We first meet him a couple of blocks from Red Square trying to imbue FedEx's Moscow branch with the Stakhanovite spirit. 'We live or die by the clock,' he tells them.
  Back home in Memphis, Tennessee, he has a fiancée, Kelly (Helen Hunt), a research scientist working on her doctorate and, except for a nagging tooth, all seems well with his life. After a pre-Christmas dinner, he promises to be home for New Year and possible nuptials, after he's accompanied a Fed-Ex cargo plane to the Antipodes. Unfortunately, the plane loses radio contact with Tahiti in a storm and in a superbly extended crash sequence that leaves you searching for a seat belt, Chuck is washed up on a small island, the only survivor.
  Robinson Crusoe actually had it lucky with a wrecked ship from which to salvage for rifles, gunpowder, tools, clothes, timber and so on. He also had a rather grand island to explore, to map and to colonise. Chuck Noland, whose name suggests someone dumped in no man's land, has wound up on a hard place as inhospitably rocky as the one that provided the briefest of sanctuaries to the eponymous hero of William Golding's brilliant and remorseless Pincher Martin.
  Chuck has nothing except for a few random parcels, containing a woman's party dress, a pair of ice-skates, a volleyball, some VHS cassettes and a document annulling a marriage. When the body of his dead pilot is washed up, he keeps the man's boots but can't bring himself to remove the belt. Crusoe managed to retrieve some of the ship's instruments; Chuck has a fine pocket watch, a family heirloom given him by his fiancée, whose photo is in the cover.
  The first days on the island are well managed - the discovery of coconuts, the shaping of tools, the hope of imminent rescue, the descent into despair. The film's colour is cold, unromantic, quite unlike the gorgeous Technicolor hues of the 1949 (British) and 1980 (American) versions of The Blue Lagoon, both shot in the same area of the South Seas.
  There are neat details here. The retrieved volleyball is given a face painted in blood, named Wilson after its manufacturer, and becomes a cross between a mute companion and a fetishist Cargo Cult object. An ice skate becomes a primitive dental tool for the most painful exercise in sadomasochistic orthodontics since Marathon Man.
  Unlike Crusoe, Noland defecates (hiding behind a bush) and urinates boldly into the sea, and it's during a moonlight slash that he spots a distant light which raises rapidly dashed hopes of rescue. Of his sexual yearnings, we hear nothing and, unlike Crusoe, he has little in the way of larger social or spiritual experiences.
  There's no frisson like the solitary footstep on the sand. No modern Man Friday appears. In fact, there are no unforgettable images that lodge in the mind like those scenes in Luis Buñuel's Robinson Crusoe, where the hero climbs a hill to shout out the Twenty-third Psalm as a defiant challenge to an indifferent universe, or where Friday innocently puts on a woman's dress and throws Crusoe into a perverse crisis of revulsion and attraction.
  Cast Away, in fact, jumps four years from the first terrible weeks to the final period, when Noland has adapted to his new environment, but is preparing to escape on a raft. The big change is not internal (we never discover his religion, his politics or his aesthetic interests other than his love of Elvis Presley) but purely physical.
  Tom Hanks spent 18 months getting into condition for the second part of the movie under Dr Paul McAuley, credited as 'Weight Loss Adviser', and the American Humane Society saw to it that in the scenes involving the skewering of crabs and other foodstuffs 'no animal was harmed'.
  To reveal that Hanks makes it home is merely to acknowledge that this is a big-budget Hollywood picture, produced by its star, and there is a drawn-out, sentimental coda that more or less re-enacts Tennyson's 'Enoch Arden', that great Victorian poem about a desert-island survivor returning to discover that life has changed and his wife has remarried.
  Weirdly, however, this finale turns into a tribute to Noland's employers, and the real-life boss of the organisation, Paul Smith (billed 'As Himself'), turns up to welcome Chuck back to 'the FedEx family'. Unlike FedEx, however, Cast Away finishes up delivering a neatly wrapped, somewhat disappointing package rather slowly.