Interspecies Love and the Balls it Requires.

Like the aqua spawn of THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and Abe Sapien from HELLBOY, our collective consciousness accepts the “Gill Man” as a species; a familiar alien entity in our science fiction. Yet in Guillermo del Toro’s unique THE SHAPE OF WATER, the Gill Man has transcended the species demarcation and is now more “man” than “gill.”

See how far we’ve come: In BLACK LAGOON, women screamed, overacted and swooned into the arms of the Gill Man, for the poster shot of Creature Carrying Woman, and it was assumed the Creature would Weinstein the human woman if she was not saved by the rugged hero. Then Abe Sapien in del Toro’s own HELLBOY II had a “thing” for an underworld chick; this time, at least, the Gill Man was allowed some unrequited love with a woman who did not fear, or was repulsed by, him. Now, in THE SHAPE OF WATER, the Gill Man has a consensual sexual relationship with a human woman – and everyone’s okay with that! See how far we’ve cum?

During the race-riot 1960s, in “a small city near the coast,” an “asset” is “dragged out of the river muck in South America” and brought to an aerospace plant for containment and study. A cleaning lady discovers the asset is an aquatic anthropoid creature, a Gill Man, and forms a bond with him. When she learns of the Gill Man’s fate – dissection by the military – she rescues him to set him free, thereby setting herself free in the process.

You know what I like about THE SHAPE OF WATER? Not just that it’s crammed with visual texture, or that it draws from so much of our cultural consciousness, or that every shot is an art explosion, and each character breathes with painful human clarity, but that it is purely original. Not a sequel or a prequel, not from a novel, not a true story, not a superhero film, not a reboot or a remake, not a stodgy drama about kids reconciling with their parents during adulthood – writer-director del Toro (PAN’S LABYRINTH) and co-writer Vanessa Taylor (DIVERGENT) have forged this mythic tale from whole cloth.

Sally Hawkins is mute cleaning lady, Elisa, immediately appealing, immediately nude, and immediately masturbating. Her daily ritual of masturbating in the tub is a movie device that tells us love is missing in her life (although I don’t know why “masturbation” should be that device. Maybe she’s oversexed? But in movies, being oversexed is also considered a problem…sigh). However, the fact that she pleasures herself in water is a foreshadowing.

Elisa lives with middle-aged Giles (Richard Jenkins), a closeted gay ad painter trying to reclaim his artistic job, during the advent of commercial photography; a pathetic lonely soul himself, Giles (ha! Didja notice his name? Like “gills”) has a few pleasant sign-language words with Elisa as their paths cross every evening, when Elisa sets out for her midnight shift at the aerospace plant. Octavia Spencer is Elisa’s cleaning friend and accomplice, Zelda.

Strickland (Michael Shannon) is the government agent who ostentatiously hauls in a water tank to a classified room one night: “The most sensitive asset ever to be housed in this facility.” We suspect Strickland is a loon with his belligerent attitude toward what’s in the tank, and with each scene, he reveals himself to be more unhinged: washing his hands before he pees with arms akimbo on hips, because “it reveals a character flaw if a man washes afterwards”; misogynistic, racist, sadistic, with an extreme devotion to Nick Searcy’s unforgiving, hard-nosed general…

Michael Stuhlbarg is Hoffstetler, the lead scientist who studies the creature in the tank; at first, he seems to be on the side of Strickland – until we discover he isn’t even on the side of America! He’s a Russian spy in the aerospace plant (of COURSE he is; Russia has had moles in the American government from way back then, all the way to Dumbo Donald in 2016), who tells his superiors that Russia can learn from this creature because it is intelligent. But Russia just wants to kill the creature, to prevent the Americans from learning anything from it – and the Americans want to “learn from it” by killing it and studying it. (Seems the only thing stunted minds have in common is killing.) Stuhlbarg has always played cool, sympathetic roles, and his Hoffstetler is no exception, as he risks his life to help Elisa save the Gill Man. “I don’t want an intricate beautiful thing destroyed!”

That knowing smile when a Gill Man’s tackle perfectly fits your bait.

When Strickland stumbles bleeding out of the asset room one day, with two of his fingers sliced off, Elisa runs in to discover – the Gill Man (Doug Jones in an amphibian suit). Entranced, she empathizes with the Gill Man’s loneliness and fear of his alien environment. Now we realize why this tale had to be set in the ‘60s, because Elisa makes numerous unauthorized visits to the Gill Man simply by swiping her security card; with modern tech security, she would be found out immediately. Her fondness for the Gill Man grows, as she brings him boiled eggs and Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman albums on a Gramophone, and he learns her sign language, which means they are doing what all intelligent creatures do – communicating.

Yes, but when does it get to the fornicating?

For THE SHAPE OF WATER to succeed, it needed to transcend all those simplistic BEAUTY AND THE BEAST tropes of platonic “love,” and classically beautiful women falling for ruggedly handsome beasts (Sally Hawkins is a very non-conventional yet alluring beauty!), and the most insidious trope of the “beast” protagonist changing into human form so that “physical love” won’t freak anyone out, which completely negates the message of “loving the alien” if you’re going to make the alien look like YOU. So SHAPE astounds us with its bravery of moving into the intercourse arena with gills wide open.

Elisa, on the bus, traces falling rainwater across the pane – the droplets looking for all the world like sperm chasing an ovum, multiplying. A metaphor, or my jovial imagination?

Movie opens with Richard Jenkins narrating about a “princess, a tale of love and loss, and the monster who tried to destroy it all.” Of course, the “monster” is not who we think it is at all. In a tale this un-ordinary, it takes a master storyteller to weave the threads of happenstance in such a way that we accept the actions of his damaged characters. From Elisa, the lonely mute, orphaned as a baby with scars on her throat, (emulating… gills?), who finds such understanding in an alien creature that she is aroused to coitus with it (without even knowing if it possessed the requisite hardware!); Zelda, whose moribund marriage allows her to empathize with anything yearning for freedom; Zelda’s husband, so “small” that he doesn’t even think to stand up for his wife against Strickland in his own home; Strickland, so unhappy with his wife talking during clinical sex that he comes onto Elisa simply for the sake of her silence; Giles, who must go through a rejection fire of his own to understand the loneliness of Eliza.

“Life is but the shipwreck of our plans.”

Just as Andy Serkis has become the King of Mo-Cap, Doug Jones is undoubtedly the King of the Fantasy Creature Suit. He imbues his Gill Man with such rapturous emotion, such poignant connectivity, it elevates what was once the visage of a monstrous deviant (in BLACK LAGOON) to that of the rugged six-packed leading man.

Elisa tries to tell the Gill Man how many eggs she has left, so…

I was disappointed that Giles had to be shown suffering rejection by the ad agency and the homophobic diner chef, before he would help Elisa. Only then did he realize what it was like to have no one. Earlier, he balked at helping the Gill Man because, “He’s not even human.” Elisa signs at him: “If we do nothing, neither are we!” If Giles had offered to help before he suffered humiliation, before he felt that his life held no more hope, then his help would hold more worth, no? As it is, it’s a man teetering on the edge of insanity with nothing to lose. Why wouldn’t he help two ladies and a Russian steal a Gill Man?

Strickland told of the South American tribes worshipping the Gill Man “as a god,” and later lectures Zelda how it can’t be a god, because “the Lord created humans in His image – even you. Well, maybe more like me than you.” Then the ending is gonna surprise the hell outa that racist…

Knowing that del Toro was affected by BLACK LAGOON as a child (thinking it was a love story about the Creature and a lady which would end happily), we consciously feel his rewrite in the final scenes of SHAPE. Like Tarantino rewriting Hitler’s demise in his own brutal manner, del Toro recreates that earlier movie’s actions only to have them soar in other directions. Del Toro’s Gill Man carries unconscious Elisa into the water. It’s the same Creature Carrying Woman pose that adorned thousands of ‘60s movie posters, but this time – the woman is going willingly; this time, the man who looks on is not doing so in horror, but serenity, knowing the woman has found her place. And he’s gay. (There are even theories that baby Eliza was abandoned near the water with throat scars because she was OF the water to begin with, and has found her way back, the Gill Man not transforming her scars into gills, but merely opening up her actual nascent gills.)

Like Steven Spielberg before him, who re-cast world-destroying aliens as benign musical visitors, Guillermo del Toro has re-cast the Beast that can remain a Beast and still be respected, revered, loved. With his implicit message of quiet strength and noble beauty the Gill Man challenges us: How far can we cum?

END

Signage Pwnage.

After a murder investigation goes cold, the mother of the murdered girl purchases advertising on THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI to turn up the heat on the local sheriff, by reminding the town of his neglect:

RAPED WHILE DYING

AND STILL NO ARRESTS?

HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY?

It’s not a murder mystery, it’s not a cop drama, it’s not about racial tensions; it’s a story about love. Yes, really.

The love of a mother for her murdered daughter.
Writer-director Martin McDonagh (IN BRUGES, SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS) leans into the story immediately, as a woman (Frances McDormand) drives past three disused, decrepit billboards, missing panels, shrouded in morning fog, on a lonely stretch of country road. She visits the advertising agent (Caleb Landry Jones) and buys the space. We find out the woman is Mildred Hayes, whose daughter was murdered seven months ago, with no killer found. The billboards “keep it in the public eye, focus their minds on the case…”

The love of a man for his family, and his recognition of another’s love for her family.
Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) is a tragic sympathetic figure, walking the line between placating Mildred and the reality of the long-gone killer. And he has cancer. His solution to spare his wife (Abbie Cornish) and their kids the pain of seeing him deteriorate, would go hand in hand with his decision to secretly aid Mildred in keeping those billboards up.

The love of a damaged deputy.
Willoughby’s deputy is a racist sadist named Dixon (Sam Rockwell), the walking id of the department. He is the first to see the billboards – in reverse order; a great storytelling device. In his extreme attempts to nullify the billboards and their owner, we discover he harbors a devotion to Chief Willoughby that borders on homosexual. In a moment of blind rage, Dixon throws the advertising agent out a two-storey window. Yet when he reads Willoughby’s final letter to him, our tears will flow for Dixon. It is not – as we thought – a letter of chastisement, but of love: “Hate never solved nothing, but calm thought does. Try it for a change. No one will think you’re gay. And if they do, arrest them for homophobia. Won’t they be surprised?” Dixon finds he had the belief and love of a man he admired, and it affects him profoundly, so much so that his last act – or what he thinks will be his last act – is an act of love, as he protects the cold-case file of Mildred’s daughter, by throwing it from his burning body.

Though there is an explicit theme of “anger begets anger” (voiced by many characters), it is ironic then that the many acts of love blindside us.

The love of a man who saves his bully.
Peter Dinklage (GAME OF THRONES) plays the put-upon town midget, who holds a torch for Mildred, and who is regularly taunted by Dixon. It is he who arrives first to aid Dixon in a conflagration. (His inclusion in the tale gives it that IN BRUGES flavor.)

The love of a man who forgives his assailant.
The agent, thrown out the window by Dixon, is shocked to find Dixon sharing his hospital room. Instead of using the opportunity to avenge himself on the helpless Dixon – he quietly brings him an orange juice.

With so many acts of love passim, we realize there is no reason to portray Mildred’s family life in flashback as idyllic. No Kodachrome moments, as Mildred wages open battle with her rebellious daughter (Kathryn Newton), who at one point screams, “I hope I get raped on the way!” as she storms out of the house. Mildred’s ex-husband (John Hawkes) is no better, as a wife-beating redneck who left her for a 19-year-old (Samara Weaving). Mildred’s long-suffering son (Lucas Hedges) seems the only balanced family member.

Mildred herself is not painted as a rational hero. Her solution to locating her daughter’s killer is undeniably fascist – databases and “every baby born listed on it,” and if there is a match for a murder, “simply kill the person.” Talk like this, whether sarcastic or serious, tells us there will never be an answer to her billboardic prayer. Yet we can still conjure sympathy for Mildred, as she brings new flowers to the billboards every day – and when the boards go up in flames from a mysterious arsonist, her soul-stricken gasp reminds us that not only were they a prod to law enforcement, they were the shrine, the last memento of her daughter’s existence.

Frances McDormand would win the Golden Globe for Best Actress. Sam Rockwell, who should have won Best Supporting Actor for GALAXY QUEST (1999) or MATCHSTICK MEN (2003), or Best Actor for MOON (2009), at last nabs a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor in this film. Now others become the supporting actors to watch: the formidable character actor Zeljko Ivanek as a deputy, imperious Clarke Peters as the new Sheriff. Each performance in this movie is an integral cog in an exceptional ensemble.

McDormand plays the tragic mother with a very distinctive look: overalls, bandanna, short hair tied back, no makeup. Though it works for the story, it’s disconcerting that only by bowing to male tropes can a woman be regarded as “strong.” The opposite end of that spectrum is the searing hot woman who uses her allure to ensnare men, which is also an incorrect rendition of “strong.” It’s a much bigger discussion than we have the time for here – just mentioning it because I’ve seen so many excited women praising this “strong” woman, when they’re only praising her “masculine characteristics.”

The tone of THREE BILLBOARDS constantly flits from somber to black comedy, although I don’t think it is quite as successful in the comedy department as McDonagh’s other truly black comedy, IN BRUGES. When taken out of context, in trailers, some scenes spark with comedic energy (for example, Mildred kicks a boy in the nuts, then kicks a girl in the cunt – it’s funny because it’s rare!), but in the context of the story, this act illustrates Mildred’s frustration and isolation; the kids getting their comeuppance is not funny, it’s satisfactory. Then Mildred swears outlandishly when driving past a live TV reporter – it’s funny because it’s a blooper! – however, she is merely reminding the reporter that the real story (her daughter’s rape and murder) is far from over. It strikes us that rape and murder is not funny, but tragic.

Yes, there are instances of anger begetting anger: Dixon’s bitter man-mom (masculine Sandy Martin), coaxes Dixon to “get to Mildred through her friends”; the priest (Nick Searcy) comes into her home to petition against her billboards: “If you hadn’t stopped coming to church, you’d have more understanding of people’s feelings” – to which Mildred reminds him of the clergy’s boy-fucking proclivities; the dentist talks ominously of “Willoughby having friends in town,” while he moves in on her mouth with a whizzing drill – which Mildred grabs and redirects through his thumb; Mildred’s ex-husband hasn’t got a kind word for her current life or choices; and Dixon himself is unwitting victim to Mildred when she unleashes her anger through Molotov cocktails.

To answer your question, No, THREE BILLBOARDS (filmed in Sylva, North Carolina) is not based on a true story, McDonagh inspired to write it upon seeing billboards relating to an unsolved murder in some southern American state.

Movie includes the song Walk Away Renee (originally performed by The Left Banke 1966; The Four Tops 1967 cover is here) – such a classic sound that brings us into another era, and finds some resonance with the movie: “And when I see the sign that points one way…” / “Just walk away, Renee / You won’t see me follow you back home…”

The conclusion of THREE BILLBOARDS might be comparable to NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, with no satisfactory wrap on the murder mystery. But it never was about the murder; it is about redemption, not revenge or even justice. It’s not about catching the killer – it’s about the repercussions of putting up those titular billboards, and how that act redeems a few souls, not least, Dixon and Mildred.

Many viewers comment on wanting resolution on whether Dixon and Mildred followed through on their vendetta. If you read the movie carefully, you’ll realize it is telling us that all these people are inherently “good” and only needed to discover that within themselves. With that in mind, we might conclude that Mildred and Dixon found some kind of internal peace while in the act of moving forward to “enact justice,” and probably turned back around and had a beer with Dixon’s Sasquatch mom.

END

When Statistics Became Sexy.

Brad Pitt ends MONEYBALL with, “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” which is ironic, because he just spent the whole movie deconstructing The Great American Pastime’s romanticism with “sabermetrics” (a clinical mathematical process that focuses purely on statistics to choose players), wheeling and dealing at the highest levels of the baseball industry with wrath-of-God money, and buying and selling players like sides of beef. So romantic.

Pitt plays the real life talent buyer for the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, who was awarded a baseball scholarship for his unlimited potential in all disciplines – pitching, hitting, fielding – which proved to be a bust. He just didn’t have the follow through. Now in his late 30s, general manager of the A’s, he finds himself taking advice from the crotchety old men on his board, trying to beat the big-budget teams on their own ground – by buying superstar players, with no budget to speak of. In desperation, Billy latches onto a statistics whiz-kid, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), whose advice seems to be working for other teams with minimal budgets.

Brand’s strategy is not to be distracted by the glam value of players (“Does he have a good-looking girlfriend?” “Is he a drug risk?”), but to go deep into their stats (How many times do they get on base? How many walks can they accrue?). Beane and Brand put their counter-intuitive strategy into motion, raising eyebrows within the Oakland board on why certain non-glam players are making it into the team, not least the ire of coach Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman in a small but brilliant performance).

The strategy works. While it was being implemented, the crotchety old men resisted, their excuse: that it was threatening the game, but it was really a threat to their livelihoods; all the experience they had accrued over the decades being discarded. Oakland A’s would go on to win a record 20 games in a row at one point. When asked why he was still morose, Beane tells Brand he cared nothing for the money, the records, the rings, “If we win on our budget, with this team, we’ll have changed the game.” He wanted a sea-change, he wanted baseball to be regarded from this statistical angle, undervalued players chosen on their merits over the glamour boys…

Be careful what you wish for…

MONEYBALL shows us the genesis of the strategy that now informs all baseball drafts. Beane’s methods worked so well that he shot himself in the foot. Whereas he once had an intellectual advantage over the big budget teams, when the big budget teams did in fact adopt his methods, they then also possessed his strategic expertise PLUS big budgets!

“Money can disregard what baseball likes and dislikes.”

Directed by Bennett Miller (from the book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game), MONEYBALL’s performances are naturalistic method with unobtrusive camera. Hill keeps it straight, and Pitt keeps it grounded. The scenes around the scout table arguing player merits are like real meetings, with overlapping dialogue, occasional stammering, and straightforward discussion even when perturbed. Who are these fantastic old guys, and why don’t they seem like they’re even acting? One scene between head scout Ken Medlock and Pitt illustrates perfectly that unspoken fear of becoming irrelevant, and the exemplary naturalistic acting, as a talk about destroying the team turns into a quick exchange of blows, Pitt pushing the frustrated, jabbing Medlock away from him. It’s not “movie fighting”; it looks like a real case of someone getting jabby and being shut down.

How do fans keep any loyalties to their teams with all the players being swapped so often and nonchalantly? And so obviously for money? And when a ball player you worshiped is suddenly sold to a team that is playing against your home team, what then? And if you do in fact find baseball romantic, isn’t all this shuffling of players in a meat market more like one big gang bang?

END

Uglier than we can imagine.

THE UGLY TRUTH seems to be telling us that strong, intelligent women are not desirable, or at least, not as alluring as eye-candy T&A who exhibit only as much brainpower as required to breathe and fuck.

Why does the movie make its leading lady an ambitious, intelligent, decisive woman until she is in the proximity of her leading man? His message is that domineering women are “bitches” and men are only attracted to eye-candy T&A. If she really WAS intelligent, why does she immediately crumble like a schoolgirl under his tutelage? Which effectively proves she is NOT intelligent and strong, but desperate, insecure and petty.

So the movie’s message is that women can’t even BE strong and intelligent because it is only a facade until a stronger MAN comes along.

I don’t even have to be my usual double-slice of misogynist – I’m just describing exactly what the movie is portraying.

Gerard Butler is Mike Chadway (was Brick Mandick already taken, in Masculine Names For Dummies?), who has a segment on a News Program called The Ugly Truth, where he rants on women and relationships.

“…They say they want true love, but all they want is a check list. Is he perfect? Is he handsome? Is he a doctor? For you men who fit the criteria, don’t kid yourselves. Cuz they’re not sleeping with you, they’re sleeping with a carefully calculated set of venal choices. Money over substance, looks over soul, polished over principles. No gesture, no matter how real or romantic will ever compensate for a really impressive list of credentials.”

Katherine Heigl is his leading lady Abby Richter, producer of a competing television show, who thinks Chadway is full of himself and talking garbage.

But when the studio boss (Nick Searcy) tempts Chadway onto Abby’s show for higher ratings, Abby more than eagerly falls for Chadway’s shtick as it will help her bed Dr. Colin, her dreamy neighbor (Eric Winter). Her unconditional acceptance of Chadway’s methods to entrap the good doctor with her wiles means she has accepted his ranting as gospel. Which means all you ladies out there who dismissed Chadway as chauvinistic should ALSO be accepting him – because he is helping your leading lady, successfully we observe.

And very bluntly: all the courting and relationship advice Chadway gives Abby is absolutely true; and everything that Abby does corroborates Chadway’s advice, meaning the movie itself proves Chadway right – yet by story’s end, the movie which has just shown us how right he is, castrates him and tries to make us believe he is falling for his leading lady like any lovestruck low-rent douchebag, retrofitting his advice as if it was simply the wayward ranting of your average garden variety male chauvinist sex piggy. That’s called cognitive dissonance – holding two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time.

Written by three women – Karen McCullah Lutz, Kirsten Smith and Nicole Eastman – THE UGLY TRUTH, like most “romantic comedies” (‘scuse me while I vomit in my mouth and swallow it down for saying that phrase), is a case study in cognitive dissonance. To paraphrase a dictum made famous by Nicholson: like all women – they can’t handle the truth! Never mind that irritating advertising campaign that shows Heigl holding a heart up to her head and Butler holding one to his groin – UGLY TRUTH has nothing to do with “men thinking with their dicks while women think with their heads” or “men thinking physically, women thinking emotionally” – the movie is actually premised around Abby thinking with her groin and Chadway thinking empirically.

As with every unwatchable White American Romantic Comedy, there are a few fun bits, a few titters, but not worth the annoyance at how implausibly those situations are arrived at. Nice to see Cheryl Hines outside CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM and John Michael Higgins in another small but effective role.

Chadway is right in classifying Abby as a dominating bitch – yet she was more than willing to stultify her dominatrix tendencies to bed the sexy doctor, which means that for the sake of sex she was willing to give up her very personality! Ultimately, she doesn’t give herself to the doctor, confessing she doesn’t really like him. Which is yet another admission that Chadway’s “woman’s checklist” exists; the checklist that Abby in fact subscribes to, and that she has discovered – as Chadway predicted – is an unreliable method of choosing partners. The movie proves time and again that Chadway’s dictums are correct – through its own leading lady!

After truisms like “Never talk about your problems ’cause men don’t really listen or care”; after the implicit message that the only way dominating bitches can be tamed is in the embrace of a MORE dominating man (Butler the perfect Man’s Man for this role); after being directed by a man (Robert Luketic, MONSTER-IN-LAW), for the sake of pairing the couple for the final scene, Chadway is emasculated so he can snivel down to Abby’s low-self-esteem level for a fadeout snog.

That’s soooo vagina.

This is the exact moment THE UGLY TRUTH falls apart as a movie, a comedy and as a simple document on human interaction:

As a novelty gift, Chadway sends Abby a pair of vibrating panties (this in itself is another topic of discussion, pertaining to cultivation, which we won’t enter into), and she accidentally ends up wearing them out to an executive dinner meeting. (Already, you can feel the contrivance building, can’t you?) At the meeting, she loses the remote control for the panties, which a little boy picks up and starts fooling with, sending her into paroxysms of public pleasure, which she tries to pass off as needing to go to the toilet. (Someone actually wrote this stuff down in a screenplay.)

She rises, crossing her legs ostentatiously, and announces she’s going to the bathroom (to remove the panties, which only we the audience know about). Then the movie hits rock bottom when her boss asks her to stay and give her presentation to the execs…

Who in their right mind would ask someone to stay and give a presentation after they’ve just announced, cross-legged, that they’re heading to the toilet?

And then: who in their right mind would STAY and weather the mind-glutting pleasures of an orgasm in public? Which is what Abby does, going one better than Meg Ryan in WHEN HARRY MET SALLY by having a real scream-gasm.

A simple “Let me visit the ladies room first and I’ll be right back,” would suffice for professional protocol.

Yes, it’s funny and farcical and prurient – but arrived at in such a contrived manner that it ruined it for me and I had to put my pants back on in the theater.

END

Bosom buddies.

A Breath Of Fresh Island Air.

Chuck Noland (plump Tom Hanks), inextricably married to his time-sensitive, nerve-fraying job as a FedEx consultant, rather than to his quietly-suffering fiancé Kelly (Helen Hunt), finds himself suddenly and unceremoniously negated from Civilization’s jetstream when a plane crash leaves him Stranded On A Desert Island.

CAST AWAY seems to be nothing new: we’ve seen and heard it all before with Crusoe, the Robinsons, Thoreau’s elective isolation in Walden, BLUE LAGOON (1949 and 1980 versions), even Oliver Reed in a 1986 movie called, heh, CASTAWAY.

Why then is this CAST AWAY so absolutely compelling?

In our arrogant, present day technophilia, we feel ourselves masters of the world; we feel that Nature, once so forbidding, cannot scare us the way it did before we discovered fire and grocery stores and cell phones. But – like OPEN WATER or INTO THE WILD – CAST AWAY reminds us that Nature is still Master, that we are a hair’s breadth away from being overwhelmed by it; that knowing how to setup a HD TV is nowhere near as important as knowing how to start a fire with no matches.

“What am I gonna do with THESE useless blades and strings and leather shoes?”

Writer William Broyles Jnr. and director Robert Zemeckis audaciously acknowledge their audience’s intelligence in making Chuck’s island interlude all the more powerful and poignant by what they leave OUT. Chuck crashes in his FedEx plane (in an incredibly realistic sequence), so a few parcels wash onshore that he ultimately utilizes; other than that, the filmmakers go to great lengths to make Chuck discover the basics of survival with a learning curve so slow we would not be criticized in questioning his mental aptitude. But he’s not retarded, he’s just modern.

Minimal dialogue and no soundtrack; no computers, fridges, no undercurrent of electrical paraphernalia pulsating subliminally, no lawnmowers or leaf-blowers growling on faraway lawns, no iPods, piped muzak, TV commercials bombarding lies of “whitening whites” – a slice of heaven. If you can get past the small fact you may die a lonely death there.

“Mmm, looking good, Wilson.
Let me just make your mouth a little bigger…”

In one of the FedEx parcels, a volleyball, which soon attains a “face” made with Chuck’s own blood. Naming the volleyball Wilson, Chuck attains the “human” companionship that stops him going completely nuts. And there is a certain elegance in Wilson being forged from Chuck’s blood; he is, in essence, part Chuck.

Chuck has to learn fire, shelter, spearing fish without looking like a Keystone Cop, calendar-keeping (very cool to see him trace out the sun’s analemma on his cave wall), weather patterns, raft-building, all the while his only picture of Kelly keeping hope alive. Then there’s the problem of his escalating tooth decay…

To heighten the impact of Hanks actually looking the part of a man who has been marooned for years, Zemeckis and his crew took a year hiatus from this movie to make another movie – WHAT LIES BENEATH, a not-too-shabby thriller starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer – before returning to commit CAST AWAY’s second half to film.

We meet Chuck “four years later” (a physically overhauled Hanks), now a sinewy hunter caveman, living on coconuts and crabs, and able to spear fish from twenty feet away without computerized targeting or iPad apps, which he devours raw and expressionlessly.

the death of wilson

When it comes to volleyballs drowning, we are ALL castaways…

Admit it – you cried over a volleyball. We all did.

CAST AWAY is a perfect example of not needing extraneous elements to “add excitement” to what is an extremely interesting thought experiment. On the island, Chuck never encounters headhunters or villains trying to tie him to railroad tracks – not needed; during Chuck’s raft escape, no sharks or Krakens. And yet, one event moves us more than any vaunted action-adventure possibly could.

Wilson the Volleyball had by this time become more than just a conversational equal with Chuck (Chuck would speak to Wilson, wait for a reply – which only he would hear – then reply to Wilson); he was Chuck’s conscience and psychological better half. Before they shove off on their escape raft, as the wind howls and the rains splatter, Chuck ties Wilson to a strut and instructs him, “You don’t have to do anything – just hang on!”

And hang on Wilson does, through the tempest of charging the breakers offshore. And days later, on a sun-dappled glass ocean, when the water and food is spent, as Chuck dozes exhausted on the raft, Wilson, whose bonds were loosed with the fury of the storms, plops quietly into the endless ocean. Chuck wakes, sees Wilson being taken by the tide, tries desperately to rescue him… but Wilson drifts helplessly away…

And heartbreak over inanimate objects took on a whole new meaning.

For thematic closure, Chuck must necessarily escape back to First World indolence, in a fourth act where he finds he cannot reconcile his new Life-awareness with that of society’s stultifying rigors, nor can he rekindle the “love” which kept hope alive whilst marooned. Though Kelly’s unavailability seemed like a death knell to Chuck at first, it actually enables him to embrace a free-wheeling optimism, only evidenced in the film’s final moments… as he delivers a parcel emblazoned with angel wings back to the farm from whence it came; the only parcel he never opened on the island, for whatever mystical reason.

Seems the parcel belongs to a spunky brunette (country singer Lari White) who just happens to live recently-divorced on this isolated farm. It may seem over-convenient, but the scene is written artfully (with its own tiny slice of backstory within the movie, if you pay very close attention), with Chuck realizing the brunette is the owner of the parcel only after she flirtily gives him directions and drives off — and he sees the angel wings logo on the backboard of her retreating truck. And he gets that man-glint in his eye…

Coconuts and crabs tonight, old son!

END