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2000, Dreamworks
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Tom Hanks, Helen Hunt
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I remember day-dreaming in a boring lecture at theological college one day, when the lecturer stopped and asked, ’Mr John, will you tell me why you keep looking at your watch?’ I had to think quickly. ’Yes, sir,’ I said. ’I was concerned that you might not have time to finish your interesting lecture.’
Someone who perhaps paid a little more attention in their classes, Albert Einstein, once said, ’When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.’ Time plays a significant role in our lives, and we can’t ever seem to shake it off.
In Cast Away, Tom Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a manic Federal Express trouble-shooter who travels the world at a moment’s notice. Both his professional and personal life are ruled by the clock, and the words, ’time’, ’watch’ and ’pager’ are spoken of twenty-four times in the first fifteen minutes. Early in the film, Noland, a man seemingly in control of everything, gives a speech on the theme of time to a group of Russian Federal Express employees.
Clip One: The Speaking Clock
A boy runs over a bridge, clutching a parcel with Federal Express labels on it. It’s snowy and cold. He keeps running. We cut to the scene inside what looks like a warehouse, where Chuck Noland is lecturing Russian Federal Express employees on the virtues of timekeeping. It’s all a battle against the relentless march of time, he argues passionately. Clocks tick away as his visual aid to people of another country, another culture, for whom this idea seems a little foreign. A Russian translator keeps up with his increasingly frenetic exhortations to ’keep time’.
Suddenly, he notices that the boy with the parcel is before him, panting. He grabs it, and opens it. ’What could it be?’ he asks, patronisingly. His tone prompts sarcasm from the translator, who says something he can’t understand.
Pulling out the contents, it’s . . . another clock, a stopwatch, in fact, that he sent to himself by Federal Express and which he started the moment he left Memphis for Russia. It has taken eighty-seven hours, twenty-two minutes and seventeen seconds for the package to arrive.
Too long! It’s just not good enough!
What if the parcel had been something really important?
Noland then turns to the job in hand: the Russians have a pile of packages that must be gathered and loaded onto a truck in under fifteen minutes to be sent to the airport. ’It’s crunch time,’ he declares. ’Let’s go!’
If Only there was Enough Time
I’m sure you’d agree that the pace of life is hectic. We talk of the ’peak’ or ’rush’ hour. We are always telling our children to ’hurry up, get a move on!’ It is because our days are too full and because they move too fast that we never seem to catch up with ourselves. Our work and the demands upon us seem to expand to fit all the time that we have. Time is increasingly in short supply. And we spend a good deal of our time complaining about it.
How often have you heard yourself, or others say, ’If only I had the time’? Or, ’There’s never enough time.’ ’I don’t know where the time goes.’ ’But how do you find the time?’ ’I’m hard pressed for time at present.’ ’I’ll try to find time.’ ’Is that the time already?’ ’My, how time flies!’ ’Could you fit in time?’ ’I’m short of time.’ ’Mustn’t waste time, must we?’ ’I just ran out of time.’ ’I don’t even get time to think.’
We have a wide range of other expressions as well: ’I haven’t got a moment to spare.’ ’There are never enough hours in the day.’ ’We always seem to be on the go.’ ’There’s always so much to do.’ ’I never seem to stop.’ ’We’re flat out at the moment.’ ’I’ve just got to rush.’ ’The week’s simply flown.’ ’Back to the treadmill.’ ’No rest for the wicked.’ Then, there’s the revealing invitation: ’You must come around some time . . . ’
The pace of many people’s lives is literally killing them. We have bought into the crazy idea that the busier we are, the more important our life is. We live in a society in which the expression ’time is money’ has come to refer to the value of time. The only problem with this is that money cannot buy more time. We forget that money can be replaced, but time can never be replaced. We would be far richer as individuals and as a society if we were to say that ’time is priceless’. Then we might treat it with more respect.
Our modern hustle and bustle places us in the grip of what the psychologist Paul Tournier calls ’universal fatigue’. People are constantly complaining about how tired they feel. We even feel tired when we wake up in the morning. Diane Fassel wrote in her book Working Ourselves to Death that ’work is god for the compulsive worker, and nothing gets in the way of this god.’ Work becomes an end in itself, a way to escape from family, from the inner life, from the world.
When Time Stands Still
Following his speech in Russia, Chuck flies back to Memphis to see his long-time girlfriend Kelly (played by Helen Hunt), the girl he’s about to propose to. But Chuck lives in such bondage to time that he can’t even schedule time for a dental appointment. During a Christmas dinner, his pager goes off. He is called immediately to South East Asia to deal with another Federal Express problem. He and Kelly hurriedly open their Christmas gifts to each other in the car, on the way to the airport. Chuck gives Kelly a journal and a pager in order to record her life in the world of time. She gives him a pocket watch – a family heirloom, in fact – with her picture inside.
He says, ’I will keep it on Memphis time – Kelly time.’ He then hands her a ring box with the parting words, ’I’ll be right back.’
Halfway over the Pacific Ocean, his plane is brought down by a terrible storm. Chuck is the only survivor. Somehow, he reaches shore on a small deserted island. The first thing Chuck removes is his pager, which is filled with water, and then his pocket watch, which has stopped.
Time as he knew it has ended. The clock is no longer a pulsating, relentless taskmaster. Having lived his life by the second hand, Chuck realises that time is not under his control any more than the circumstances of his existence. This awareness forces him to face the self-imposed limitations of his life. Chuck tried to measure everything with time, but didn’t know how to use it. He abused and ignored people. He now gets pushed outside time – cast away. The maddening thing for him is that while his own clock may have stopped, the world’s time marches on.
So, we have a man obsessed with time who is trapped in a purgatory that he cannot regulate. He goes from clocking seconds digitally to tracking the seasons by the movement of the sun. He no longer controls time – it controls him. In a touching scene he looks at the ID of one of the dead crewmen who was washed ashore, just before burying him – and realises that he didn’t even know his real name. It is a moving testimony to the tyranny of the urgent and how busyness can distract us from relating to the people who are close to us at a deeper level.
We then see how Chuck figures out the four basic elements for human survival: food, water, shelter and fire. But there is a fifth element he needs badly – companionship. Federal Express packages from the plane crash begin to wash ashore – packages he can’t deliver. Chuck finds novel uses for their contents, but decides not to open one particular parcel that is adorned with angel wings. The wings become a symbol of hope for him, one that far outweighs any physical use he could have found for what was inside.
In one of the boxes, he finds a volleyball. Having cut his hand, and then grabbing the volleyball, his bloodstain leaves an image of a strangely compelling face. With slight modifications of his own, Chuck uses his own blood not only to create, but also to bond with his new companion. ’Wilson’ becomes the ’friend’ who keeps Chuck sane while he’s on the edge.
Only after four years does Chuck make a daring – and successful – escape from the island. He returns to civilisation a profoundly changed human being, but realises that he can’t pick up where he left off. On the plane flying home, his friend Stan tells Chuck they held a funeral for him. They put in his coffin a phone, beeper and Elvis CDs – which they had decided were the things that best represented his life.
Clip Two: All the Time in the World
Noland is sat in a house, in semi-darkness, talking to his friend. He has a drink in his hand, and is reflective. He tells of how he talked to Kelly when he was on the island; that even though he was totally alone, she was with him. He knew, or thought he knew, that he would get ill, or injured, and die. Everything had been out of his control . . . apart from one thing: his own death. The only choice he had, the one thing he could determine, was how and when and where it would happen. So, he’d made a rope, and climbed a hill to hang himself. He tested the rope first, to see if it would bear his weight, but the log he used snapped the branch on which the rope hung. He realised that he didn’t have power over anything. He couldn’t even kill himself properly! But all of a sudden, he said, a feeling came over him – like a warm blanket. He knew, somehow, that he had to stay alive, keep breathing – even though there was no reason to hope, and even though he didn’t believe that he would ever see this room again – so that’s what he did. And the tide came in, and washed up a sail . . . and here he is, talking to his friend, in Memphis.
But after all that . . . after everything . . . after his hope in the face of despair . . . he’s lost Kelly again. And he’s desperately sad about it. But, in the face of that sadness, he can remain happy that she was somehow with him on the island. And now? He’s got to keep breathing, once more. Tomorrow, he says, the sun will rise. And who knows what that could bring?
The Absence of God
Cast Away, to use a quote from the Berlioz requiem, is ’haunted by the absence of God’. In contrast, Daniel Defoe’s seventeenth-century novel Robinson Crusoe is filled with God’s presence. Crusoe is a man who rebels against his parents to become a sailor. He joins up with a ship to set out for the Seven Seas in search of adventure.
He becomes the sole survivor of a shipwreck, condemned to live out his days on a desert island. Though Chuck Noland and Robinson Crusoe experience similar circumstances – both being stranded on a desert island – Crusoe, in direct contrast, begins to contemplate time and eternity.
The book Robinson Crusoe is full of his thoughtful, probing encounters with God – his weaknesses, fears, temptations. It explores how Crusoe learns to love God and the world. He is someone who runs from God and who cries out to God. And this is what’s disappointing about Cast Away. In the end, the film only offers a picture of the person that seems far away from the reality of human experience. Crusoe’s pilgrimage rings true in a way that Cast Away simply does not.
Noland stressed three points in his speech at the beginning of the film in Russia. First, he states that time rules over us without mercy. Christians might disagree, and argue that it is God who rules with mercy. Second, he says that we live and die by the clock – rather than by the grace of a sovereign God. Third, he says, never turn your back on the clock or commit the sin of losing track of time – it is a pulsating, relentless taskmaster. But he has no concept of a loving, compassionate God.
The psalmist writes, ’Our days on earth are like grass; like wildflowers, we bloom and die. The wind blows, and we are gone – as though we had never been here. But the love of the Lord remains forever with those who fear him. His salvation extends to the children’s children of those who are faithful to his covenant, of those who obey his commandments’ (Psalm 103:15–18). The writer of Ecclesiastes states beautifully that ’God has placed eternity in our hearts.’ And because God has placed ’eternity in our hearts’, we know that nothing of ’time’ will permanently satisfy us.
One thing we can observe from films like Cast Away is the utter emptiness of life without God. Life derives its true meaning not from self-fulfilment or success, but from a personal relationship with our creator. As C. S. Lewis once said, ’If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.’
When God Intervenes
There is a story in the life of Jesus, recorded in John 5:2–9. ’Inside the city, near the Sheep Gate, was the pool of Bethesda, with five covered porches. Crowds of sick people – blind, lame or paralysed – lay on the porches. One of the men lying there had been sick for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him and knew how long he had been ill, he asked him, "Would you like to get well?"
’’’I can’t, sir," the sick man said, "for I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred up. While I am trying to get there, someone else always gets in ahead of me."
’Jesus told him, "Stand up, pick up your sleeping mat, and walk!"
’Instantly, the man was healed! He rolled up the mat and began walking.’
The man had been lying there for thirty-eight years, his eyes staring at the water; his gaze fixed on his only hope of something better. The very cause of his need prevented him from having that need met. Suddenly, his world is interrupted by a voice asking him if he wants to be made well. What a strange question! Surely, the answer is obvious? But his answer is revealing: it’s not ’Yes, that’s what I’ve been longing for,’ but a statement of the problem as he sees it – he has no one to help him into the pool.
Originally, all he wanted was to be healed, to walk and run as others could. Now, all he wants is someone to help him in to the water. The pool has become the object of his longing, and he cannot see any other solution to his problem. Sometimes, the search, however wearying and unfulfilled, becomes everything for us.
In fact, all he needed was a word from Jesus and, in an instant the pool, which had been his hope and his despair for thirty-eight years, seemed unimportant.
No matter how hard we try, we cannot pull ourselves out of the quicksand of time. That is why we need someone to change the way we see things, to lift our eyes, so that we can peer beyond time and be led towards eternity. That someone is Jesus. Our search for eternity brings us to him. Jesus said, ’I am the way, the truth and the life.’ Life with Christ is an endless hope; without him, it is a hopeless end.
At the Crossroads of Life
In the movie The Last Emperor, the young child anointed as the last Emperor of China lives a life of luxury with a thousand servants at his command. ’What happens when you do wrong?’ his brother asks. ’When I do wrong, someone else is punished,’ the boy replies. To demonstrate, he breaks a jar, and one of his servants is beaten.
In Christianity, Jesus reversed that ancient pattern: when the servants erred, the King was punished. Grace was free only because the giver himself bore the cost.
At the end of Cast Away, we see Chuck Noland standing at a crossroads. He is in the middle of the road, able to go in any one of four different directions.
Clip Three: At the Crossroads
Chuck Noland parks at a sweeping crossroads, in the middle of, well, seemingly nowhere. One road seems white, sandy, yet the others are dark. It’s a hot day, and the sky is blue. The landscape is flat and yields no clues about direction. He gets out of his car and unfolds a map. Another car swings by and stops. A woman, happy, smiling, helpful, tells him he looks lost. ’Where you headed?’ she asks. That was what he was trying to figure out, he replies. She tells him exactly where each road leads, which directions he can choose. And with that, briefly, she wishes him luck, and drives off, up the white path – her dog peering at him from the back of her pickup. Chuck stands there, watching her drive into the distance. He looks round at every path, slowly. And stares once more along the woman’s path.
The road Noland was standing on was in the light, but the other three were in the dark. The movie’s final scene ends with Chuck seeing the wings on the woman’s truck.
Making Time for What Really Matters
In St Paul’s Cathedral in London hangs Holman Hunt’s painting, The Light of the World. It is a picture of a cottage that is run down, and bushes and briars have grown around it. The path is covered by weeds and grass. Standing at the door, Jesus is holding a lantern in one hand that gives off light to every part of the picture, and he is knocking with the other hand. After Hunt completed the picture, one discerning critic said to him, ’Mr Hunt, you made a mistake. There is no handle on the door.’ The artist replied, ’No, I did not make a mistake, for there is a handle. The handle is on the inside.’
Once a little girl and her father were standing in the cathedral. They were mesmerised as they looked at the painting. Then the girl asked, ’Daddy, did they ever let him in?’
A few years ago, I had a dialogue with an atheist professor. He spent a good deal of time mocking both Christ and my experience of him. In front of me was a fruit bowl, and I ate a tangerine. After I had finished, I asked the professor, ’Was the tangerine sweet or sour?’ He said, ’How can I know whether it was sweet or sour when I never tasted it?’ And I replied, ’And how can you know anything about Christ if you have not tried him?’
God our Father is the maker of everything that exists. He is the Author of the world of nature, and the Creator of both space and time. Without God, there would be no past, present or future: no summer or winter, spring or autumn, seedtime or harvest. There would be no morning or evening, or months or years. Because God gives us the gift of time, we have the opportunity to think and to act; to plan and to pray; to give and to receive; to create and to relate; to work and to rest; to strive and to play; to love and to worship. Too often, we forget this, and we fail to appreciate God’s generosity. We take time for granted and fail to thank God for it. We view it as a commodity and ruthlessly exploit it. We cram it too full, waste it, learn too little from the past, or mortgage it off in advance.
In doing so, we also refuse to give priority to those people and things which should have chief claim upon our time. We need God’s help to view time as he sees it, and to use it more as he intends. It is crucial to try to distinguish between what is central and what is peripheral; between what is really pressing, and what can wait; between what is our responsibility and what can be left to others; and between what is appropriate now and what will be more relevant later.
We need God to help guard us against attempting too much, because of our false sense of our indispensability, our false sense of ambition, our false sense of rivalry, of guilt and inferiority.
We also need God to help us not to mistake our responsibilities, underestimate ourselves, or overlook our weaknesses and to understand our proper limits. We need to realise that, important though this life is, it is not all that there is. So, we should view everything we do in the light of eternity, not just our limited horizons. It is a matter of true perspective.
God is not so much timeless, as timeful. He does not live above time so much as hold all times together. Despite its inadequacies, the film Cast Away is, above all, a timely reminder.
