An amusing, sweet story about a young NYC writer (Sandra Bullock) who is forced into rehab in Tennessee after her alcoholism accompanies her on a car ride. The film is essentially about her stint there, and while predictable, it is moderately affecting and consistently funny. Bullock is also a surprise. While her range is not exactly expansive, she plays a damaged daughter of an alcoholic mother (who eventually died and abandoned Bullock and her sister as children) with some skill. Better, her part is loaded with wry rejoinders, her strength. A lot of good supporting turns, including Viggo Mortenson as a baseball pitcher working on a coke addiction; Steve Buscemi as Bullock’s counselor; Dominic West as her charming boozehound lover; and various other characters. This is not heavy lifting, and it is very AfterSchool Special, but it is well done.

Before I saw Castaway, I was assured that if I had to spend time on an island with a major male film star, Tom Hanks would probably be a good choice.  He seems affable, neat and even-keeled.   I was not disappointed.  His Fed-Ex plane goes down in the South Pacific, he is stranded on an island, and he combats the elements and his various misfortunes while making attempts to escape to civilization.  The time spent with Hanks is well worth it.

The problem with Castaway, however, is that director Robert Zemeckis tucks a love affair between Hanks and Helen Hunt (Washington, D.C.’s City Paper correctly observed that Helen Hunt was again cast as Helen Hunt) pre-stranding that is mundane and equivocal; post-stranding, it is confused and drawn out.  While Hanks is on the island, out of necessity, he strikes up a relationship with a volleyball.  Unintentionally, this relationship towers in depth and complexity in comparison to the one depicted between Hanks and Hunt.  So, when Hanks gets back to civilization, the meat of loose ends and forged relationships and a changed world are not there to greet him, or us. Rather, the only thing we get to see him confront is the bland Hunt, and her on-again-off-again Tennessee drawl.

Side note:  Tom Hanks is given the worst maladies in movies.  In Philadelphia, it’s AIDS.  In Castaway, he has to give himself what appears to be a root canal.  In The Green Mile, he has a urinary tract infection that has him peeing what appear to be razors.  What the hell?

You can only go so far with Oliver Stone’s antics behind the camera.  But sometimes, it gets you 3/4 through a movie.  Watchable, occasionally engaging, and always stupid, anything of value from this movie comes from Stone’s eye on the speed and madness of professional football.  His frenetic editing and jump-cuts to varying film stocks keeps you watching, plus the fact that it is football, it is glitzy, it is steamy, sultry Miami, and Dennis Quaid, Jamie Foxx and James Woods provide some surprises to their hackneyed personas.

All of which helps you forget that Al Pacino, as the gruff ole’ coach, is mailing in his 76th lousy post-Tony Montana performance; Stone’s tried-and-true preachy and over-the-top screenplay of (you guessed it) man stuff and redemption; Stone’s excesses, borne of a director who simply won’t take “Um, Oliver, isn’t that a little much?” for a question; a high cheesiness factor, as Stone (unlike Cameron Crowe in Jerry Maguire) apparently wouldn’t pony up to pay for NFL rights, so we are left with the Dallas Knights and the Miami Sharks; and, an embarrassing turn by wide-mouth bass-headed Cameron Diaz, as a supposed ball-busting owner of the Sharks (it appears she just misses her Daddy, the former owner, who wanted a boy).