Hearing Cast Away director Robert Zemeckis swear by Francois Truffaut's proclamation that cinema is all about spectacle and truth seems at first to be a bit unlikely and out of character. Robert Zemeckis? One of the world's most successful pop culture film-makers? Truth? Where?
Of course, the spectacle element is not in question. Since his first directorial success with Romancing the Stone in 1984, Zemeckis's career has been all about pushing the technological aspect of movie-making to its limit in order to give viewers unprecedented visual experiences. And he has.
Whether it's flying DeLoreans in the Back To The Future trilogy, speed-of-light ping-pong playing in Forrest Gump, Bob Hoskins fending off sexy cartoons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or the sight of Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep pummelling each other with shovels in Death Becomes Her, the element of spectacle has always stalked through his movies like an over-zealous bouncer, keeping any deeper themes that may be present at arm's length from the audience.
Most critics would dismiss the idea that Zemeckis is preoccupied with the idea of the individual's fundamental isolation from the world, and his helplessness in the face of fate - it's a rather weighty concern to have in Hollywood. In fact, in his movies, fate is neither benign nor malevolent. It is simply there, and how illusory our sense of control over it is what Zemeckis seems to want to point out.
Take Jodie Foster's character Ellie in the 1997 science fiction sprawler Contact. The oh-so-plucky scientist defeats all odds (and the practical scepticism of all-comers) to show six billion of us that we are not alone in the universe. Except that Ellie herself is. Her mother died in childbirth and her father followed his wife into the ether a few years later, leaving Ellie all alone wondering what's it all about.
Revolving around her, as she spends her life searching for little green men, are various characters with their own philosophies of life: Tom Skerritt's scheming realist trying to take all the credit (which he would do, but for a terrorist and a quirk of fate); Matthew McConaughey's sermonising "man of the cloth" whose only answer is that God has the answers; or the blind seer, scientist-companion, who tells Ellie that "she must find out for herself".
Existential undertones in a Hollywood blockbuster? Surely not? Well, actually not. By the time the search for extra-terrestrial life had boiled down to Ellie coming to terms with being left alone as a child by her parents, we may feel cheated by not hearing any cosmic messages, but, c'mon folks, we knew all along that none were coming. The deep "what's it all about?" issues will invariably be overshadowed by some homily about how life goes on, because Zemeckis can posit no answer, save that there is none - and that wouldn't do as the ending of a Hollywood movie.
Take everyone's favourite idiot, Forrest Gump. His participation in and influence over so many of the 20th-century's most memorable moments may seem like heroic stuff, but Gump is just a kind-hearted fool who is plunged into extraordinary circumstance. Zemeckis adapted Forrest Gump from a novel that was heavy on satire, but he chose to present Gump in a more dramatic way, to emphasise rather than diminish the pathetic nature of the character.
In his recent success, What Lies Beneath, Zemeckis is more explicit about exploring the psychology of character. Having conceded at the outset that the only way to make a successful psychological thriller is as a homage to Hitchcock (incidentally, Zemeckis's director's bible is a Truffaut book on Hitchcock), he goes on to make a soso Hitchcockian thriller, but takes a far more interesting look at the interior life of his lead character than Hitch would ever have bothered doing.
Michelle Pfeiffer is almost Hamlet-like in her struggle to come to terms with what's going on around her, while the answer is lodged inside her the entire time. In terms of Pfeiffer's character, what lies beneath is isolation, solitude and a dislocation from the reality of her circumstances. After one particularly frightening and perplexing episode, she finds the words "You know" scrawled on her bathroom mirror, and she does know, but the truth that may help her solve the riddle of the movie has been repressed. The reality of her character is as well hidden from her as the true nature of her own husband.
Opened last week, Cast Away is ostensibly a Robinson Crusoe-style parable about valuing what we have because it could all disappear in an instant. However, whether intentionally in the writing and direction, or due to a commanding and involved central performance by Tom Hanks, the movie winds up tackling a far more intangible notion.
Hanks's four years alone on the desert island serve to highlight the absurd nature of existence. Late in the film, he reminisces about why he tried to kill himself after only a short while on the island - because he had control over nothing. His former (successful, fulfilling) life, in which he would swear by the dictum "never turn your back on time", is shown to be nothing more than a more elaborate way of creating the same illusion of control.
At the movie's close, Zemeckis, of course, reverts to type, or at least toes a little of the Hollywood line, when he suggests that love is the answer, or would have been were it not hijacked by circumstance. But he can't leave it at that. The final shot of Hanks standing at a crossroads with a forced smile reminds us of the movie's subtle underbelly, which is, as in so many Zemeckis movies, that most of the time we haven't a clue and are just struggling to react to the world, never mind carve out any meaning from it.
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