Finch(Apple)

Rating: *** ½

Not since Castaway have I seen Tom Hanks so immersed in his character that I could not see Hanks on screen at all. Like Castaway , Finch is a one-man show. There is only Hanks to hold our attention for two hours.And boy, does he get it! More character needed to populate the plot? Hanks, but no thanks.

This a work of art embedded in a profound humanism. On the surface it is just a routine dystopian drama about am aging ravaged post-apocalypse survivor who is counting his days. But underneath the weather-worn climate-ravaged surface , Finch secretes a tragic underbelly. Compassion empathy and the human touch are spotlighted in scenes that could have easily slipped into schmaltzy nonsense.

For his genuine compassion and an ongoing surge of regret and nostalgia for a lost civilization Director Miguel Sapochnik invokes tremendous respect from us. The Game Of Thrones director is at the top of his game here. Miguel is no survivalists’ champion. He is not here to make a statement on how to cope with impending doom.

Into the doom he injects a wealth of hope and sunshine. Just the sheer joy of watching Tom Hanks and his dog sharing a post-cataclysmic kinship is indescribable. Both Hanks and the canine Goodyear(played by Seamus) are brilliant actors, Hanks a little superior (sorry,Doggie).

I could see so much history on Hanks’s face that it became crystal-clear that the director couldn’t have chosen a more vital and vivid representative of a post-apocalypse civilization.

We see remnants of a lost world embedded in every shred of Hanks’ being. In his last film News Of The World we saw Tom Hanks saving a teenage girl from impending peril. Here too it’s not so much about self-preservation but the will to survive in a congenial climate.

I am not too fond of films about robots. But here the humanoid contraption is so well voiced by Caleb Landry Jones it never feels like a set-up.

The film about a man,a dog and a robot has deep resonant feel to it, the music by Gustavo Santaolalla creating a harmony between Nature’s devastation and Man’s urge to heal the hole. The film’s stunning visuals of open skies and looming storms furnish it with a distinctly epic look that made me think about how spectacular it would all seem on the large screen.

Happily the size of the screen doesn’t limit the scope of the drama. The feel of empathy compassion and healing when we need them the most loom large in this drama of doom devastation and a sliver of salvation.