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Six years after Forrest Gump comes this reunion of director Robert Zemeckis and star Tom Hanks: Cast Away (see above), a movie with a curious brand of uplift. It uses familiar themes but tinkers with conventional formulas. For much of the movie there's no dialogue save for the hero talking to a volleyball. Mr. Hanks is a FedEx executive whose plane crash-lands in the South Pacific. For four years he survives alone on an island, a modern Robinson Crusoe who learns how to spear fish and live through typhoons. But Daniel Defoe's 18th-century Crusoe also learned much about God. Released as one of this year's few clear Oscar contenders, Cast Away is part adventure and part pop optimism a la Forrest Gump and the Hanks cult classic Joe vs. the Volcano. The film is strange: "There are no atheists in foxholes or rubber rafts," the saying goes, but Mr. Hanks's character spends time on a rubber raft and a wooden raft without apparently learning anything at all. He could be expected either to praise God or curse God, but only a thoroughly materialistic worldview would suggest that he would ignore Him. The film works as a movie spectacle and star vehicle, with an ironic touch: The survivor who spent his life worrying about time and efficiency must carry on in the limbo of isolation and peril. In an anticlimactic ending, the survivor returns to a world that has moved on without him.
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