INT. DAY. TOM HANKS is in a building or wherever, I don’t care. He’s on the phone with HELEN HUNT, is the point. You remember Cast Away, I’m not going to explain it to you.
TOM HANKS’ CHARACTER: So your daughter, Katie, is like…one year old, right?
HELEN HUNTS’ CHARACTER: Eleven months.
TOM HANKS: I figured, because there was that one scene where we see Chris fucking Noth feeding her baby food and she’s sitting up unsupported in a high chair and if she’s already on solid foods and grasping and holding herself up unassisted, she was probably at least eight or nine months old.
HELEN HUNT: Right.
TOM HANKS: Okay, so that’s a year, give or take. Nine months before that, obviously. You guys aren’t exactly young parents, so it probably took you a little while to get pregnant. I’ll be generous and say it took just three months.
HELEN HUNT: That’s kind of personal.
TOM HANKS: Yeah, well.
HELEN HUNT: Why the sudden interest in math?
TOM HANKS: I was gone for four and a half years. On that deserted island.
HELEN HUNT: Right. I remember. It was terrible.
TOM HANKS: Sure. Whatever. And I already said I understand that you had to move on, but you were pretty serious on selling me that you kept all these charts of where my plane went down and how obsessed you were about it, and how long your friends had to tell you to move on before you married my dentist.
HELEN HUNT: Our dentist.
TOM HANKS: Right. Also, in case you ever find yourself in a similar position in the future, it was a little bit chilly to choose your new husband to tell me that you’d gotten married.
HELEN HUNT: Oh.
TOM HANKS: You could have had literally anyone else tell me that news, and it would have been better. Because I understand if it was too painful for you to tell me yourself, but you could have found a neutral third party to break it to me.
HELEN HUNT: Right, right.
TOM HANKS: Like, you could have pulled a random member of the crowd aside and asked them to give me the message. I would have preferred that.
HELEN HUNT: That’s totally fair.
TOM HANKS: So. I disappear the day after we get engaged. Counting backwards of four and a half years, that’s one year for the baby, nine months plus three – give or take – of trying to conceive and being pregnant. You guys dated for what, six months, a year, before you got married?
HELEN HUNT: About a year and a half.
TOM HANKS: Right, because it takes a little while to plan a wedding, even if you’re not planning something super elaborate. Which I imagine you wouldn’t have, for obvious reasons.
HELEN HUNT: Because we were all still so sad –
TOM HANKS: Because you were all still so sad about how dead I was.
HELEN HUNT: So sad.
TOM HANKS: So that’s four-and-a-half years, minus one year, minus nine months, minus three months, minus eighteen months.
HELEN HUNT: I guess so.
TOM HANKS: So that leaves one year.
HELEN HUNT: One year of what?
TOM HANKS: One year almost to the day between losing your fiancé and starting to seriously date his dentist.
HELEN HUNT: It wasn’t that serious at first. If that helps.
TOM HANKS: But it’s not like it was even someone knew who didn’t know me. You started dating a man who had been inside my mouth about a year after you thought I drowned.
HELEN HUNT: It sounds really weird, when you put it like that.
TOM HANKS: It’s not like I wanted you to become a nun. That’s just, like…the absolute bare minimum mourning period.
HELEN HUNT: According to whose rules?
TOM HANKS: Everyone knows that. It’s just something everybody knows.
HELEN HUNT: Oh, everybody just knows that if your fiancé disappears after an unsurvivable plane crash you’re supposed to wait two years instead of one before you try to love again just in case he might have survived and used a picture of you to keep himself from madness and suicide for four and a half years on a deserted island?
TOM HANKS: I don’t make the rules.
HELEN HUNT: Charming. Real charming.
TOM HANKS: I’m just saying it would have been nice. I wouldn’t have said anything if I came back and you had just some guy on the side. You’re a woman with needs. I get that.
HELEN HUNT: I kept that car you loved running for you. For four years, I kept restoring that car. That’s not a metaphor for my sexual fidelity, either; I literally kept your car in pristine driving condition without even using it.
TOM HANKS: Yeah, about that. You can’t get credit for the maps and the car and keeping a never-ending remembrance torch burning for me AND having roughly seven teenaged children with your sleazy husband at the same time. You can’t have it both ways.
HELEN HUNT: I have literally one child.
TOM HANKS: You know what I mean. And then to tell me you’ll run away with me so I have to be the bigger person and drive you back up your stupid driveway to your stupid husband because you know I’m not going to be the jerk who leaves your kid without a mother? That’s fucking rich, Helen Hunt.
HELEN HUNT: I think my character’s name is Kellie. And I feel like I absolutely can find happiness and start a family while still maintaining a deep and abiding love for my lost fiancé.
TOM HANKS: Whatever. It’s been a long time since I saw this movie. I was thirteen and I had really strong opinions about how long you’re supposed to wait if someone disappears at sea but you never find their body, and apparently I still do.
HELEN HUNT: I feel like you’re trying to make me feel like a bad person because I didn’t know you were alive. Which I had literally no way of knowing, no matter how much you stared at that picture of me.
TOM HANKS: Ugh, no, you’re right. It just kind of sucks.
HELEN HUNT: I agree that it sucks. I just don’t know what you want out of this.
TOM HANKS: I don’t know. For it to…not suck.
HELEN HUNT: Okay, well, you realize I’m not capable of making that happen.
TOM HANKS: No, I know.
HELEN HUNT: Sometimes life just plays horrible, cruel jokes on decent people. And maybe it’s easier for Mallory to get mad at my character instead of accepting that you can’t control everything in life.
TOM HANKS: Helen Hunt, I’ll be honest with you; I was not expecting you to talk me around to your perspective, but it’s hard to keep arguing with you. I think I’m really just looking for someone to blame in what’s a fundamentally blameless situation. Life is just capricious sometimes and I want a villain to pin it on.
HELEN HUNT: Look, I get it. That’s a fundamentally human desire.
TOM HANKS: Chris Noth was a real fucking dickbag about telling me you got married, though.
HELEN HUNT: Oh, absolutely. Even though I wasn’t in that scene, I can bet he was a real fucking tool about it.
TOM HANKS: And why are his lips always shiny and wet, like he just licked them?
HELEN HUNT: RIGHT? That was all I could notice in the last season of Sex and the City. Like, are his lips professionally chapped?
TOM HANKS: Anyhow, good talk.
HELEN HUNT: Yeah.
FADE TO BLACK.
Tags: cast away, dying at sea, movies, opinions i formed when i was thirteen with no life experience, relationships, revenge, tom hanks, yes yes we’re all very sad about the volleyball
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“Catharsis.”
I have always wanted a sequel to Castaway which consists of two hours of Tom Hanks talking to the Social Security Administration about getting reinstated as a living person. I estimate one and a half hours is just him dramatically listening to hold music and scribbling To Do lists on scratch paper.
As a person who makes a living in Health Care Bureaucracy, I shudder to even think what this would involve…
I would appreciate regular Tom Hanks coverage from now on please. Thank you.
😀
I’ve never seen Cast Away but I feel that one year is not nearly long enough to remain single after the supposed love of your life disappears/dies in a plane crash. I’m going to say this is largely because I’ve been single since high school, not generally by choice, and so remaining single for a while and NOT falling in love a year after a devastating accident seems like it should be the default option. How easy is it for you to find people to marry if you’ve got a new one so soon after losing the last one? Can I get just one love of my life before you move on to your second one? Is it really that hard to be single for more than year?
ETA: This is also how I feel when I look at people on Wikipedia and see that they get remarried a year after divorcing someone else or becoming a widow/widower. Did you have a backup planned? How did you find a new person to marry so quickly?
Some people just seem to get into relationships — successful, stable, long-term ones! — quickly. I know at least three such people. They bemuse me, and I’m sure I, who married the first person she seriously dated, bemuse them, but whatever, we’re all happy.
If I were her friend, I wouldn’t see any point in judging her too hard. I’d just be concerned if she really did want to be with this dentist guy (haha NOPE) and that she got enough time to process her grief enough to know she’s on a firm path of moving on.
If she asked me how long was long enough to wait, I’d tell her it was how she felt, because … if a year isn’t enough, then what is? That’s the obvious question it raises, and I sure as hell don’t know.
From a story POV? Her remarrying and having a kid and having a whole life established, basically, didn’t sell the “love of my life” angle super great, and the fact she was ready to ditch it all in a sec was kind of harsh on her character.
And who knows. Maybe if they had gotten back together, they could have broken up eventually anyway. If they ever fell out of love, they could have felt crazy pressure to remain together because of this thing they went through.
Damn, guys. Give me some serious Castaway fanfics STAT
I prefer to read it as more of a creepy dentist guy takes advantage of grief, persuades her a good sexing will help her feel better, she gets knocked up, is like, well, at least I didn’t have to generate my own orgasm that one time, what the hell, it’s better than dying alone in a plane crash, and there you go. She kept the flame burning for close to 3 years but shiny dentist sperm & loneliness got her in the end.
This interpretation deserves more attention, seriously.
If I was her friend in real life, I would definitely agree that there’s no point in judging her and she should date again at her own speed or never date again or whatever.
From my sometimes bitter, always single perspective, she got one love of her life so just calm down and stop taking all of the men, Helen Hunt!
My work husband was on a site a few months ago doing a cleanup and encountered a genuine Wilson The Volleyball stuck in a tree. He deconned the PCBs off of it and it is now his office mascot. What does it say about you when your favorite character is the damn volleyball?
Isn’t Wilson everyone’s favorite character?
The scene where Wilson “dies” is still very traumatic for me and one of my best friends. I just have to yell a distraught “Wilson!!!!” and she will get wet eyes.
The Last Man On Earth has taken the ball with face as friend thing to the next level.
This is exactly why, when two people love each other, they wake each other up in the middle of the night to discuss a mutually agreed upon game plan for every terrible scenario that could possibly befall either of them. How did 4 years on a remote island after a plane crash not come up, Tom and Helen?
I mean. It’s just common sense. Like, do you think they didn’t even discuss what they’d do in the event of a zombie apocalypse if one of them was on a business trip at the time, taking into account the proximity of both parties to the hot zone, and the availability of fresh water at each site?
my partner thinks i’m a bit nutty for discussing zombie apocalypse (any apocalypse, really) plans. he indulges me, though, so hopefully enough will stick that we WILL manage to regroup after the shit hits the fan.
My husband has all these plans for what we’re going to do when the zombie apocalypse hits. I keep telling him I DO NOT WANT TO SURVIVE ANY apocalypse and he blithely ignores me. Like, really. I’m not into continuing my existence without functioning indoor plumbing and lack of electricity and all that jazz. Can I die already?
my partner’s the “life is not worth living without running water and A/C” type. i, too, ignore his protestations. he’s pretty and i like him a lot and i want to hang out with him even in (ESPECIALLY in) a totally horrible post catastrophe world.
I am willing to rough it a bit, but I also have no interest in surviving if everyone around me is a radioactive zombie or something. No thanks.
Oh my god, your comment actually made me doubt my relationship for one second.
Now that we have a kid, we don’t do this anymore, we play out every terrible scenario in which we have to choose which person to save – the other adult, or our daughter. (Spoiler alert, it’s always the 12-year-old.)
I fully support this form of media therapy, and look forward to further installments in the event that Mallory is nursing any other corrosive, longstanding grudges against movies she saw years ago. But what are the odds of that, really.
Please do a follow-up to “You’ve Got Mail”.
Meg Ryan: “My therapist pointed out to me that you actually ruined my life”.
YES That movie was the woooooorst. My 19-year-old self was SO PISSED at her for falling for that dickbag.
It’s like some sort of corporate Stockholm Syndrome…
Also don’t even get me started on the shitshow that was “My Best Friend’s Wedding.”
That was my favorite movie when I was a teenager with no life experience, and until I recently rewatched it on a plane I’d never realized how batshit insane Julia Roberts becomes in that movie. She literally chases (like, on foot) a man who is literally chasing another woman. And not to apologize, but to try and get him to marry her. I’d like an Ortberg followup based on hazy memories where no one forgives her for any of the crazy shit she pulls.
Not to mention the fact that she’s cray because she (horror of horrors) pursued a career (GASP, BOO, HISS) in her twenties rather than dropping out of college to get married (as the Cameron Diaz character did, IIRC).
Reading the Wiki entry for this movie, Roberts’ character is TWENTY SEVEN (GASP) and Diaz’s is 20. HAHA. Wow. Hollywood.
Oh, it is the worst. But at least she doesn’t get the dude in the end. Somehow that would have made it all even worse.
Between that and Living In Oblivion Dermot Mulroney had girl trouble……up the ass.
Even in school I saw that gay BFF Rupert Everett is a way better win than that boring groom.
You’ve Got Mail is a much better movie if you end it after he loses his shit at the restaurant and then drives her out of business.
You been fuckin’ Travis?
“longstanding grudges against movies”
Julie Delpy. “White”
YES. Loved Red and Blue. Infuriated by White.
“If Irene Jacobs/Juliette Binoche were your girlfriend”
*faints dead away*
I’m still at least partly in love with both Valentine and Julie, honestly.
The main dude in White was such a douche.
See also: every single character in White.
That’s why I gave up “Mad Men” after three episodes and started “Spaced”. Hey, I was on vacation, I was supposed to be having fun!
There needs to be more posts in the “dying at sea” category.
Wasn’t Chris Noth’s name “Wilson” too? I mean, not only did Helen Hunt marry Tom Hanks’s dentist only a year after Tom Hanks not-died, she also married a man who shares the name of Tom Hanks’s long-lost friend. That had to cut deep.
I believe his name was Spalding, i.e. Wilson’s competition.
DICK MOVE
EVEN WORSE.
That’s great writing though.
Wasn’t it not even really his regular dentist, it was the oral surgeon he went to to fuck up that tooth that went south? That guy is the source of all suffering in Tom Hanks’ life.
When I was a kid, I cried harder at Wilson floating away than at any other point in the movie. That was rough.
I did this exact same math in my head watching Castaway. But since I wasn’t 13 at the time, I just found it hilarious. I also loved how the movie treated Tom’s reappearance as if the characters were in a Victorian novel. “The love of my life has come back from beyond the grave, but alas, I have married another, so it can never be.” Early 21st century? She’d be divorced within a year. Even if she nobly decided to stay, no way is Chris Noth going to be able to compete with Tom-back-from-the-grave. Either way, her marriage is ruined.
Yes, what is it, Sebastian? I was arranging matches.
From Chris Noth’s point of view, too, why would he want to? Compete, I mean. You were crazy obsessed with him, now turns out he’s alive, well okay, then, let’s go on that romantic weekend getaway wherein you think about Tom Hanks *the entire time*. Cut your losses, Chris Noth. Your daughter will be better off being raised by two individually happy people than by two people trying to make it work and simply failing. Also the daughter, twenty years later, will not be crushed by guilt for causing two people to stay in a quick, forced, unhappy marriage. (No, I don’t have personal experience with this. Why do you ask?)
Man, I have feels about this too! So many feels!
Right? I was assuming that her romance with Chris North wasn’t exactly a perfect timeline romance; maybe she got pregnant after they were dating for a couple months, and the personal math on an unplanned pregnancy when you’re 30-something is not the same as the personal math when you’re 20-something – maybe this is one of those “let’s raise the child together” relationships?
I had this same issue with Superman returns. Unless Kryptonian gestation is super long, you found a new guy AWFULLY fast, Lois. But Cyclops is a decent guy in that movie and Supes is kind of a deadbeat, so… You probably made the right choice anyway.
I thought the implication was supposed to be that he’s Superman’s baby.
Dude, totally. That’s why he’s sick all the time.
Cast Away II: The Cast and the Furious
Cast Away III: Cast of Shadows
Cast Away IV: Full Body Cast
Cast Away V: Cast System
FULL BODY CAST I AM DYING.
I’m HERE for Cast System.
Electric Castaloo
2 Cast, 2 Curious
FLAWLESS
Star Casts VI: The Return of the Casts
Cast Away VI: Cast Harder
This post led to a conversation between Mr. B_Ham and myself where we determined neither of us would care to date after losing the other. I am going to go full Queen Victoria: dress in black, leave his shaving things just as he left them, etc. He opted for becoming a crazy cat man.
It was a good talk.
Same here. And my boyfriend is well on his way, with three cats already.
I will leave the shaving things, but the mounds of laundry are going ASAP.
Oh my god, if my boyfriend dies I will immediate get like 3 more cats, mostly because he forbids me from adopting more cats because we have two and they fight and they cost like $160/month to feed and are both enormous and have crazy huge poops.
I feel much better having a plan, you know.
Same here. I will spend a week in mourning and then it’s ALL THE CATS.
I like it! Does Wilson show up in the sequel by any chance? I never saw Wilson in any movies after Cast Away, such a shame.
CAST AWAY II: WILSON’S REVENGE
God this would have been such a great cinematic in-joke if anybody had picked it up. This volleyball keeps getting small cameo appearances in movie after movie. Sometimes he’s wearing glasses or a fake mustache. Maybe it’s not too late! Hell, they could Lucas it and retroactively insert scenes into classic movies! As a cinematic prank, it would bury the “Wilhelm scream” in the shallow desert grave it so richly deserves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmfd9etbXGE.
Alternatively… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAqZ_ft5Zm8
I dated a girl in college, and her mother’s lesbian partner would watch Castaway literally every single day. I remember going camping with her and trying to take a nap which was interrupted by this woman coming into the camper so she could get her daily castaway fix.
The only thing that broke her addiction to Castaway was when it got replaced by “Wanted” (that terrible Angelina Jolie movie about the society of killers who know how to shoot bullets in a curved path). And then she watched that every single day instead.
That is many hours of your day/week/life to devote to a single movie. I can barely devote that much time to work.
I mean, me and my friend Amanda watched Empire Records every day after coming home from school, but we were 12 and it was Empire Records.
In other Helen-Hunt-related movie grudges, WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK was with that SHITFEST ending to “As Good As It Gets”? THAT’S NOT AS GOOD AS IT COULD GET FOR YOU HELEN HUNT. JACK NICHOLSON *AND* HIS CHARACTER ARE BOTH TRASH GARBAGE.
Still furious about that movie. “You make me want to be a better man.” Like, that is not romantic, that’s the bare minimum amount of any effort ever put forth and I shall never understand why this won so many accolades.
(Orson Welles furiously applauding .gif)
I actually scrolled down to write my own furious screed about the horror of As Good As It Gets. Thank you!
Not even bare minimum. “You make me want to be a better man,” is someone telling you exactly who he is, and who he is is a man who’s even by his own estimation kind of a turd. He’s not even saying he’ll do anything to be less turdlike. He just wants to. It’s a set up for his defense a few years later, when she’s finally tired of his behavior and calls him on it. He wants to be better. Really. Maybe someday he’ll even turn up the emotional volume to trying to get better if she starts threatening to leave loudly enough.
I would like to have a rewrite of “What Women Want” where he reads REAL women’s thoughts, with about 7 voices speaking at once, all cross-referentially and at a speed and context that no one else can understand. “Cake? Dry, remember that dry cake? I love my mom. The dog sure is loud. Why don’t I have any aluminum foil? I should have used a Tupperware. Microwave? Paper plate. What’s wrong with the dog? Dishwasher.”
“opinions i formed when i was thirteen with no life experience” is a tag that needs a lot more writing in it. I felt so strongly about SO MANY things I knew literally NOTHING about. Ah, youth.
For real, can we talk about Dragonriders of Pern? I read every dragon-related book in the local library by the time I left junior high, and there was a lot of weird relationship stuff going on there that went right over my head.
Like, queen dragon’s courting ritual is literally being chased down by a pack of guy dragons? And then she’s gotta do it with whoever wins? And then her HUMAN has to do it with whoever the male dragon’s human is??? WTF is this? I was way too young to appreciate the profound awkwardness of occasionally being psychologically compelled to have sex with one of your coworkers at random.
Ugh, spoilers.
Speaking of, I feel like two years was not nearly enough time for Vaughn to have straight up married the objectively terrible Lauren Reed. Even if he thought Sydney was dead and that there was no ambiguity about it, I feel like just the wedding planning for a (omni-British Empire accented) US Senator’s daughter would take two years. And given that it was all a ruse, maybe you should have been a little more suspicious, VAUGHN.
that was bullshit is what that was.
Seriously, what’d he do, wait two months after Sydney ‘died’ to start dating again?
the devolving into an out of character meta-conversation is beautiful
I’m really relieved to know I wasn’t the only kid furiously doing the math and being all HELEN HUNT WHY.
We are all on the wrong page here. The real Castaway sequel is Wilson’s adventures at sea.
Would watch.
I’ll back that kickstarter.
If they made a sequel, I would care most about finding out what was in that one package.
> HELEN HUNT: I have literally one child.
I literally had to stop and chuckle for about 30 seconds before I could continue reading. Well done. ‘Revenge Based Sequel’ needs to be a tagged series.
I'll back that kickstarter.
Oh my god. OH MY GOD. THIS EXACT THING HAS BOTHERED ME FOR YEARS. We recently re-watched Castaway and it REIGNITED THIS EFFING OBSESSION FOR ME. I have literally spent up to ten minutes at a time ranting to my incredibly patient boyfriend about how fucked up it is that he shows up alive and she’s ALREADY MARRIED, with a KID. ESPECIALLY since she tells him she’s still in love with him and he’s the love of her life and she knew he was alive!! I MEAN WHAT THE HELL. I cannot tell you how glad I am that I am not the only person who thinks these things.
Cast Away VI: Cast Harder
Omg this was great. I have always hated the ending with a passion ! She needs to leave new hubby I think she was just lonely but damn his dentist!!! That effed up his tooth. And then for her to say I KNEW you were alive…well then why the F*ck did you get married to someone else and have a baby I was solo angry with her. Love the movie always so furious at the end at Helen Hunt