Only five years ago, people were hiding. They thought what they did was wrong and that the public was against it. They found out that the public is actually for it. The production people are for it. The companies are for it. There is really only a very small segment of people who are opposed to product placement.

TEN YEARS AGO, The Atlantic Monthly published Mark Crispin Miller's brilliant and sustained attack on the marriage of movies and marketing. "At times," Miller wrote, "the movies have made good on [their initial] promise, by treating us not as wired consumers, but respectfully, as persons somehow still outside [the media-industrial complex], and so still able to be moved and challenged by its devastations." That was 1990, however, and this being 2001, those times have become very rare. Cross-merchandising, synergistic promotions, and million-dollar placement deals have become the rule rather than the exception in Hollywood. But even in this age of Demolition Men and Runaway Brides, the flagrant product placement in Cast Away is something to behold.

Cast Away is the story of Crusoe-esque FedEx executive Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), who finds his obsession with punctuality thwarted by an unexpected four-year layover on the shores of a deserted isle. It has struck most critics as a terribly effective film, and Hanks (who lost forty pounds to play the role, which, given his salary, amounts to 2 lbs/$1,000,000) is expected to have a good shot at winning his third Oscar because of it. The New Yorker's David Denby, for instance, found himself transported to heights of Tennysonian eloquence: "Cast Away," he supposed "will be called a 'triumph of the human spirit,' or some sort of triumph, but what truly matters in the film is not these banalities but such momentous things as the peculiar murmuring noise that the wind makes in a cave and the mournful singsong moaning of a whale just before it breaks the surface and spouts water."

I didn't like the film quite as much as that, though I do think there was much to appreciate: For one thing, Hank's physical transformation, and the subtlety of his performance, really are Oscar-worthy. I also admired Robert Zemeckis' deft handling of the movie's middle-third (which takes place entirely on a 99-acre island near Fiji and contains barely any dialog), the riveting airplane crash, and some nifty storm scenes. Still, I agree with Denby that the film is some sort of triumph. More specifically, it is a triumph for Federal Express.