From the South Pacific to China

Not many big screen luminaries can carry a picture all by their lonesome—and I do mean that literally. Yes, in the golden age of Hollywood, you had larger-than-life actors like Bogart, Stewart, Hepburn and the like, and, for that matter, heavyweights like Brando, Nicholson, Streep and DeNiro within the last few decades. But how often did you see one of them cast in a film that required them to be the sole onscreen presence—with no actors to play against—for most of the picture?

That’s the challenge that faces Tom Hanks, star of Cast Away (2000), a Robinson Crusoe story for the new millennium. Hanks plays Chuck, a Fed Ex employee whose plane crashes in the South Pacific and who washes up ashore, dazed but alive, on a deserted jungle island. For quite a long stretch, Chuck is the only human face you see in the film, a stretch in which the spoken word is refreshingly sparse. Not since Carroll Ballard’s beautifully photographed The Black Stallion in 1979—another feature with an island survival adventure at its heart pitting a lone human being against nature—can I recall a movie that expresses so much with so little dialogue and only one onscreen actor to keep you interested.

Where Six Days, Seven Nights fails miserably, Cast Away shines. Because it’s so much more than a survival yarn. It’s about a man who’s stripped bare of everything he holds dear, faced with the gaping chasm of solitude. He finds comfort and unlikely friendship in—of all things—a beloved volleyball he calls Wilson.

The real trick for Chuck will not necessarily be to escape from his island prison, but to reclaim his life if he’s ever able to return to society. Is it plausible that Kelly, the girlfriend he left behind since being marooned (portrayed by Helen Hunt, who seems to have disappeared from the feature film landscape these past 10 years) will have waited for him? It’s the film’s curveball third act that really elevates this feature past the predictable and into deeper philosophical territory.

And that delicate balancing act is choreographed admirably by director Robert Zemeckis, who has the mettle to be a populist filmmaker as well as a maverick risk-taker of sorts. Consider, for example, that Hanks packed on 50 pounds before filming began to make him appear as a well-fed middle-aged man. But no amount of digital FX were going to shave off the love handles that he’s expected to lose while trying to survive on cocoanuts and wild island edibles, so Zemeckis shuttered production for a year to allow Hanks to lose off that weight and grow out the shaggy countenance that you see in the poster shot. That takes guts.

Cast Away plays on Wednesday, Jan. 19 at 7 p.m. at CineVerse, Oak Lawn’s free weekly film discussion group, located at Oak View Center, 4625 W. 110th St. in Oak Lawn (visit www.cineversegroup.blogspot.com for full details).

Imagine what would be worse: enduring a lonely life on a far-off island in the middle of nowhere or being a lowly migrant worker in the horrific coal mines of China. The latter is the setting for Blind Shaft, a brave and insightful 2003 film directed and written by Li Yang.

This flick depicts a nightmarish world of economic disparity, in which poor laborers are forced to toil in dangerous mine shafts so they can send money to their loved ones back home. But two con artists have perfected a scheme in which they find a gullible soul eager for a job and tell him they’ve lined up three plum coal mining gigs for themselves and a family member who hasn’t shown up. The stranger can take the third job if he pretends to be that relative, which he does. But the con men later murder the third man and stage it as an accident so they can shake down the mine’s bigwigs for extra cash.   

St. Xavier University presents Blind Shaft on Thursday, Jan. 20 at 7 p.m. at McGuire Hall as part of its free 2010-11 film series—the focus of which is on the experience of labor round the world (visit http://www.sxu.edu/Academic/Liberal/Art/film_series.asp for more info). Previous St. Xavier showings in recent months have Giuseppe de Santis’ Bitter Rice, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and Gregory Nava’s El Norte). St. Xavier University is located at 3700 West 103rd St. in Chicago.