Are Audiences Feeling ‘Cast Away’ in Heavy ‘Traffic’?

“Cast Away” and “Traffic” seem at this point to be pulling away from the competition for audiences and, probably, for awards. No big deal in that--and no shame, either. Either film would make a decent choice for that one night of the week or month that you exclusively secure for dinner and a movie. They meet the minimum daily adult requirements for commercial movies. They entertain, distract, absorb your attention in exotic, dangerous environments containing people with whom you can reasonably identify.

But some people assume that both movies are transcendent masterworks because they’ve scored positive critical consensus and mass appeal. Which is where I catch the next train out. If “Cast Away” and “Traffic” share anything besides Oscar buzz and mainstream interest, it’s that each has at least one-fourth of a great movie struggling to burst free from beneath layers of predictability and evasiveness.

It’s easy to isolate that one aspect of “Traffic’s” multilayered narrative that glows brightest--especially since it’s the one that’s shot throughout in garish yellow light. Only in those segments featuring Benicio Del Toro as an enigmatic, hard-case Tijuana detective does the movie give you something you haven’t seen played out dozens of times on prime-time TV.

Del Toro keeps you guessing from start to finish as to his character’s motives and moral code. He enters dubious alliances with Mexican drug cartels and covert strike forces against those same cartels, keeping his own counsel, making his way along a shaky tightrope toward an objective only he can see through his perpetually shaded serpent’s eyes. Pieced together, the Del Toro segments would make up a miniature masterpiece on a par with “Traffic” director Steven Soderbergh’s quirky triumph of a year ago, “The Limey.”

Soderbergh’s approach to the rest of “Traffic” sustains a gritty, pseudo-documentary intimacy that’s unusual for an epic of such range and ambition. But that’s where the ballyhooed comparisons with Robert Altman end. The go-for-broke improvisational risks Altman took in such movies as “Nashville” and “Short Cuts” are constrained in “Traffic” by its cop show/soap opera conventions.

However well-acted and stylishly paced, the story lines focusing on the complex family lives of drug czar Michael Douglas and dealer queen Catherine Zeta-Jones (do I need to say, “married in real life” at this point?) are familiar and well-worn. The underrated Miguel Ferrer is a joy to behold as the oily, federally protected snitch. But how many episodes of “Miami Vice” would you have to remember to know how that story arc will wind down?

One admits that “Traffic’s” burgeoning appeal does perform an unusual form of public service with its implicit criticism of what passes for “drug policy.” But the movie’s j’accuse somehow doesn’t land with the distressing force set up by its content. Maybe because, in true prime-time fashion, the movie also sustains the illusion that even the lingering bad stuff will somehow eventually work out all right. And the lesson, kids, is that drugs are bad and the drug war may be worse. That’s it? OK, put the cat out, lock the doors and let’s turn in for the night.

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The ambiguity lingering at the end of “Cast Away” is regarded as one of its breakthroughs. Only I don’t think there’s much doubt as to the next move made by Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), Federal Express worker, plane crash survivor, reformed clock-watcher and erstwhile desert island dweller. Of course, if I bothered to explain why I don’t think the ending’s all that ambiguous, then I’d spoil it for those who hadn’t seen the movie. And I can’t live without their love.

Neither can Hanks, nor director Robert Zemeckis, both of whom previously hit pay dirt with 1994’s “Forrest Gump,” which, like “Cast Away,” deploys seriocomic pathos and calculated coziness to tell the story of a man adrift. Being shrewd, facile entertainers, Hanks and Zemeckis figured out that in these days of a still-robust, if increasingly jittery economy, the masses would be receptive to a fantasy about a middle-management corporate loyalist forced to do without cable TV, chain supermarkets or other people.

Some dispute exists, even among those who liked the movie, over whether the 70 minutes of Hanks’ Chuck alone on the island drag on too long. For what it’s worth, I think it took guts to insert what amounts to a mostly silent movie in the middle of “Cast Away,” and even more guts to resist using musical cues at varying peaks and valleys of Chuck’s ordeal. Even in that scene when Chuck finally gets around to opening the washed-ashore cargo of FedEx packages and assessing the worth of each item, I saw the movie’s potential to become a newfangled Buster Keaton absurdist comedy. (Coming soon: Wilson the Volleyball in “Safety Last.”)

In the aftermath of the island sequence, one so strongly feels the phantom presence of a true breakthrough that it’s possible to believe that “Cast Away” is as monumental as it feels. But in the true manner of the just-ended Clinton era, the movie wants to look as if it’s taking risks while offending as few people as possible. Too soon--and too predictably--the movie opts for gauzy enchantment and crowd-pleasing wish fulfillment. Chuck’s reunion with his onetime fiancee (played by Helen Hunt) begins with a potential of high-wire tension that crashes to Earth with teeth-gnashing improbability. Now where exactly is her husband at this hour? And how exactly does she explain to her husband where their car is? Who cares, as long as everybody out in the dark goes home happy?