Thanks, Hanks

On a Saturday afternoon in August, six weeks into the run of Forrest Gump, every seat in the movie theater was filled—filled with the ordinary people of Michigan City, Indiana, who were like the movie audiences of my youth: not loud, not restless, not talking to the screen, not filled with bloodlust, but quite happily absorbed in the picture. At times some of them were crying. Looking around, I saw that many of those crying were men. I did not know what to make of this.

I had come to see Forrest Gump again because people would not stop talking to me about it. As a professional movie critic, I am a lightning rod for people who have just seen a movie: They tell me whether they liked it or not, as if I had made it myself. Not in 27 years on the job has a movie created more conversation among those folks who go to only two or three movies a year. They just plain love it. Even more so, they are moved by it, and they get funny smiles on their faces when they talk about it, because they do not know why they are moved.

And then they mention Tom Hanks, who plays Forrest Gump. They ask me if I thought it was a good performance, because, well, they add, "it really wasn't a performance, was it?" They don't think Hanks is Forrest Gump, not exactly, but they can't catch him acting in the movie. They know he got to them somehow, but they weren't able to capture him in the act of doing it. So now, thinking back, they wonder if what he did should qualify as acting, or whether it was (they finish with a relieved nod) "just good casting."

Tom Hanks, who in the minds of some of these people might as well be Forrest Gump, is certain to get an Academy Award nomination for his performance. He may even win the Oscar for best actor, which would make it two in a row, after his win for Philadelphia, the 1993 film in which he played a man dying of AIDS. That summer he had another big audience success with Sleepless in Seattle, as a lonely widower who meets a woman through a talk show and is almost prevented from finding his future with her. The summer before that, in 1992, Hanks played the manager of an all-women baseball team in A League of Their Own, and there, too, the audience was on his side, hoping his character would overcome his alcoholism and make a new start to his career.

For an actor, the odds against making a truly good movie in Hollywood are discouraging, with the industry's use of formulas and deals and habit of pushing even the most original projects into narrow channels. The odds against making four in a row, a string of movies in which the audience truly and deeply cares about your character, are so awesome that even a Spencer Tracy or a James Stewart would have thought himself blessed at the end of such a run.

Tom Hanks is now in the unique position of being the best-loved movie actor in America. The strange thing is, America hardly knows what to make of that, because Hanks is so hard to pin down. In some of my conversations about Forrest Gump, I ask people what they like the most about Tom Hanks in the movie, and they come to a dead stop. There is nothing they particularly like about Hanks in the movie because there was nothing they particularly noticed about him. It is the ultimate tribute to an actor when an audience leaves the theater remembering only the character he played.

It is the characters he has (continued on page 150) Tom Hanks (continued from page 142) portrayed that have helped distinguish Tom Hanks. Rarely in his career has he played ordinary, realistic, three-dimensional human beings. Invariably there is an edge of fantasy, magic, winsome humor or otherworldly detachment about his most successful roles. The major exception, his fullhearted excursion into straightforward realism, is in Philadelphia, where, in scenes like the luminous sickbed conversation with his mother (played by Joanne Woodward), he touches notes that everyone can identify with. He's also living in the real world in 1986's Nothing in Common, as a cynical, fast-talking ad man who's too busy for family values until he learns his dad (played by Jackie Gleason) is sick; then he discovers what's important in life. In his latest film, Apollo 13, he plays James Lovell, the astronaut whose moon mission was aborted when an oxygen tank exploded, and whose emergency return to earth was a nail-biter. The movie is being directed by Ron Howard, who likes to go for an everyday-life feel, and is likely to be pretty realistic.

Still, despite such performances, you can't easily imagine Hanks playing the kinds of slice-of-life roles that are the specialties of Pacino, Hoffman and De Niro. Tom Hanks is not and never could be Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle. More often, the Hanks character in a movie is like characters played by Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati—universal figures in which some attributes are so exaggerated that the ordinary repertory of human tics and impulses is overlooked. If Hanks were in a silent film, his character would be introduced with a card simply reading the young man. To a surprising extent, most of his successful movie roles are in fantasies.

In Splash (1984), his first big role, he co-stars with a mermaid. He plays a bachelor who runs a business in Manhattan, someone who might be mistaken for an ordinary guy, if not for the mermaid, and for a certain dreamy quality the producers must have seen when they cast Hanks: He's the kind of guy you can somehow imagine in love with a mermaid.

In 1987's Dragnet, he is Sergeant Joe Friday's partner, whose singular responsibility is to pretend that Friday's robotic policespeak makes sense. Like Jack Webb and Harry Morgan in the original TV series, Dan Aykroyd and Hanks, in the movie, are too weird, too stylized, ever to be mistaken for real cops. You can sense Hanks subtly stiffening himself into a parody.

Big (1988) has one of his best performances, as a child who just wants to be big until he wakes up inhabiting an adult's body. In The Burbs (1989), Hanks plays a goofy suburbanite who skips his vacation to stay home and spy on his bizarre neighbors. In the magical and overlooked Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), he is the central figure in a fable: a victim of overwork in a dungeon-like factory, told he has six months to live because of a "brain cloud," who sails to the South Seas to offer himself as a human sacrifice to be hurled into a volcano.

It might appear that Hanks plays a more realistic character in Sleepless in Seattle, but consider that his character quits his Chicago job after his wife's death and moves with his young son to a houseboat. He spends most of the movie trapped in a plot only the audience understands—a plot that manipulates him so that he becomes a hostage of fate. His real role in the movie is to represent all of us on our blind quest for the happiness we sense is just beyond our grasp. His character's philosophy in Sleepless could be borrowed from Forrest Gump's mother: "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."

Traditional movie stars are larger than life. Robert Mitchum once told me that he asked his wife: "Dorothy, why do they think I'm such a big deal? You know me as well as anyone, and you don't give a shit. So why do they care?" And his wife replied, "Mitch, it's because they're smaller than your nostril." The big screen makes some actors into gods, into personalities so large and overwhelming that they enter our dreams and fashion our ideas about what men and women should be. Not everyone can model for that role, and the great stars do have something magical. But the screen itself plays an important role in the process, which is why we never care as deeply about TV stars as we do about movie stars.

There is a smaller category, however, of actors who may be bigger than life, but are somehow more approachable—embodying not just a superficial reality but also a deeper essence of hope and aspiration. Watching them we feel congratulated, because we are watching ourselves. They reassure us that in our ordinariness we also have a kind of transcendence. The actors who can do that—Buster Keaton, Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman and Tom Hanks—occupy a special category. We do not exalt them as readily as performers such as James Cagney, Mitchum, James Dean, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Tom Cruise or Sean Penn, because they appear not to be acting, but simply embodying qualities that aren't particularly special to possess (since, after all, we possess them ourselves).

The central triumph of Hanks as a movie actor is that, most of the time, we believe he thinks a lot like us, and does more or less what we would do. He is a kind of Everyman, a put-upon, misunderstood, overworked, middle-class guy, basically nice, who means well, tries hard, wants to please and be pleased, and is tossed about by the winds of chance. But he somehow does it on a larger or more ennobling scale. This is a quality of James Stewart's acting. Few actors can obtain it; with most, you see their egos peeking through or you catch them trying too hard. The camera is a lie detector, and Hanks must be fundamentally a good person to play such roles—either that, or he is an even better actor than we think.

I've met Hanks several times, in interview situations and on sets. I don't have any idea what he's really like. Those are artificial situations, where he gets to choose how he presents himself. He chooses to be levelheaded and smart, with a strong element of the wry. He's much the same in one of his favorite extracurricular roles, as a talk show guest. With Letterman and Leno he's quick and articulate, a natural comedian, comfortable inside his body. He never seems to search for a word or strive for a laugh; in that he's like Cary Grant. Letterman has the best bullshit detector among the TV talk hosts, but Hanks, who as a big movie star could be a ripe target, finesses him with understatement, directness and irony. It is all done so well that we realize only later that we learned nothing at all about Tom.

Tom Hanks was born 38 years ago in Concord, California. He attended California State University in Sacramento, where he took drama classes, acted in Chekhov, and met a man named Vincent Dowling, who was artistic director of the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland. Dowling invited Hanks to Cleveland, where he appeared in a lot of Shakespeare (even winning a local critics' award for his work in The Two Gentlemen of Verona). The great British actors often begin their careers (continued on page 214) Tom Hanks (continued from page 150) at Stratford-on-Avon; it is somehow fitting for the man who would play Forrest Gump to have begun in Shakespeare, too, but in Cleveland.

After time on the stage in New York, Hanks moved to Los Angeles, and was cast in ABC's 1980-1982 comedy Bosom Buddies; in a role inspired by Some Like It Hot, he played many scenes in drag as a guy trying to live cheaply in a women's residential building. When he began working in films he already seemed like a seasoned comedy pro, comfortable in his persona as a school bus driver who gets engaged in the underrated Bachelor Party (1984), his first movie role of any consequence. And the same year he played the lead in Splash. There was no long period of bit roles and starvation; he was a star at 28.

I still feel he was cast incorrectly in Splash, the comedy in which he fell in love with a mermaid played by Daryl Hannah. His brother in the film was played by John Candy, who spent his days composing inflamed letters to sex magazines. I thought it would have been funnier if the mermaid (who had never before seen a human male) chose Candy instead of Hanks. That would have been a better use of Candy, and a better use of Hanks, too, whose best roles have him as an island of curiosity in a sea of mystery. He is never at his best in movies where he's the one who has the answers.

Look at him instead in Big, where he convinces us that his adult body is inhabited by a gawky, hyperactive adolescent. The plot has given us a 13-year-old boy who is at the age when the girls in class shoot up into Amazons while the boys remain short and squeaky-voiced. The film's hero has been humiliated in front of the girl of his dreams (he's too short to ride with her on an amusement-park ride), and he wishes desperately to be bigger. He gets his wish—and Hanks takes over the character, as a child's mind is magically transported into a 35-year-old body—and finds his true calling by working for a toy company. His secret is that he is the only one at the company who really loves to play with the toys, and Hanks finds a childlike body language for shots such as the one in which he skips through the company's lobby.

Joe Versus the Volcano, which was written and directed by John Patrick Shanley (author of Moonstruck), has been written off as a critical and commercial flop. I think it is one of the most original comedies of recent years, and it contains a performance by Hanks that works as a center of calm and sanity amid the plot's madness. From the film's opening shots of the loathsome factory—a vast block of ugliness set down in a sea of mud—the film's art design and special effects place Hanks in a world as imaginary as Oz. The notion that he will ever really sacrifice himself to the volcano is absurd, but he seems determined to go ahead with it. In the hands of another actor the role would have been impossible, because there is never a moment when the character can find an anchor in reality. Hanks does not need one. The key to his performance is acceptance: Without fuss, without blinking, he accepts the film's bizarre reality, and because he never fights it we can relax and accept it too.

It is that same matter-of-fact quality, of making himself at home in a world not his own, that underlies Hanks' work in A League of Their Own and, especially, Forrest Gump. In the baseball picture, he is a man who has always played in a man's game. When he finds himself coaching a team of women, his strategy is simply to keep on doing what he knows. He doesn't try to fight it, he doesn't figure it out, he simply coaches.

In Philadelphia, as a dying man determined to be treated correctly by the law firm that fired him, Hanks' character has two distinguishing characteristics: pride and anger. Either of these can offer an easy excuse for overacting, but Hanks knows that the audience understands the situation and doesn't need to be told about it through acting. It is always better if a film can make you understand how a character feels without the character's having to do much, externally, to explain his emotions.

Hanks' most memorable scene in Philadelphia occurs when he plays a recording of an aria from the opera Andrea Chénier for his lawyer, acted by Denzel Washington. While the aria is playing, Hanks provides a heartbreaking commentary. The aria is sung by a French noblewoman to her suitor at the time of the Revolution, and describes the death of her mother at the hands of a mob. It is an interesting choice of aria because it does not exactly parallel the situation of Hanks' character. Instead, by explaining it to his lawyer, what the dying man says is: If you can understand the feelings of this woman, who exists in a world unfamiliar to you, you can understand the feelings of anyone—even my own. It is the kind of virtuoso scene that pleads to be overacted (the character, after all, is talking over Maria Callas). Hanks does not compete with Callas, however. He adopts the manner of a teacher; he wants to share something he knows. That is the feeling I sense beneath a lot of his performances; he chooses characters who can teach us something, often in the form of a fable.

Much was made of Hanks' decision to star in Philadelphia because he thus became, in a phrase that was much-used, the first box-office star to portray a homosexual. More daring, in my opinion, was his willingness to portray himself as so desperately sick: The character is sympathetic enough that many straight actors might happily have played him. But would they have been willing to reduce themselves, through weight loss and makeup, to the stark specter of skin and bones and Kaposi's sarcoma that Hanks became in the final scenes?

In accepting his Academy Award for Philadelphia, Hanks made a speech that will rank among the Oscars' odder moments. Some, listening to it at the time, were moved by his tribute to those who had died from AIDS. Others, including those who read the speech in transcript, were unable to make much sense of it. I was reminded of Laurence Olivier's famous acceptance speech after he was given an honorary Oscar in 1979. The audience greeted it with a standing ovation, but the next day, when Olivier called Michael Caine and asked him what he thought of it, Caine told him that, frankly, he hadn't understood a word. "Quite so, dear boy," Olivier said, confessing that his mind had gone blank and, as a seasoned stage veteran, he had fallen back on pseudo Shakespearean folderol.

Hanks was filming Forrest Gump at the time he made his speech, and perhaps that fact makes it a little more understandable. Like Gump, the speech contained the right sentiments if not always complete lucidity, and it placed feeling above sense.

Still, the portrayal of Forrest Gump is one of the most mysterious acting jobs I have ever seen. Looking at the movie again on that summer afternoon in Indiana, surrounded by the snuffling audience, I began with the hypothesis that Hanks' secret was, as nearly as possible, to do nothing. The secret of the performance, I told myself, is that he does what Dustin Hoffman did in Rain Man: He finds precisely the right note, and holds it. Playing a man with an IQ of 75 and a limited vocal range, Hanks sits or stands, usually wearing a blue shirt buttoned at the collar, and speaks dispassionately, unaware that he has somehow been placed at the center of key events of recent American history.

Looking at the film, I found that my theory would not hold. What on a first viewing looked to be a one-note performance was revealed, during later viewing, to be wide-ranging but so subtle that the range is there almost without our realizing it. One reason the movie has such an emotional impact may be that Hanks, by not seeming to reach for an effect, catches our hearts unprotected.

His physical performance is minimalist. He is usually sitting or standing impassively, and even in the scenes in which he runs and runs (from bullies, on the football field, in Vietnam and then across America), his face seems set. Hanks does his most physical acting in the miraculous special-effects scenes in which director Robert Zemeckis and his technicians place Hanks in the same scenes with JFK, John Lennon, LBJ and George Wallace. Here Hanks does a perfect job of affecting the slight stiffness and formality that people adopt in the presence of the famous.

To understand the soul of Hanks' performance in the movie, you have to listen to his voice. There are a lot of lines people remember from the film; his mother's sayings, of course, and his own philosophical insights ("You have to do the best with what God gave you"). But listen to him when he proposes marriage to Jenny (Robin Wright): "I'm not a smart man, but I know what love is." It seems at first to be delivered in a monotone, but listen carefully and you can hear that he subtly emphasizes the beats of both "love" and "is," making them absolutely equal, and a little more stressed than the rest of the sentence. Not "what love is," and not "what love is," which are the ways an ordinary actor would try to sell the sentence, but "what love is." By the quiet emphasis Hanks puts on it, we sense how strongly Gump feels.

Forrest's voice is what carries the movie. He narrates it, he speaks in it and he quotes others. Some of the dialogue would tempt another actor to go for the punch line. When Forrest "invents" the bumper sticker shit happens, for example, that's obviously a laugh line. But Hanks knows the laugh is there anyway, so he doesn't go for it. To punch the line would imply that Forrest knows it is funny. That, of course, would be a mistake—a mistake Hanks is too good to make.

Any successful movie invites naysaying, and I've read criticism of the film as being an insult to the mentally retarded, a right-wing vision clothed in liberal disguise, or a free ride on the coattails of our fascination with nostalgia. One critic thought it all too significant that the microphone malfunctions during the peace rally, and we never hear what Forrest says to the crowd. But of course the point was not what he said, but that he was there. Forrest is a witness, rolling from one historical milestone to another, just as all of us are. If he has no control over the events in society, neither do we. It isn't true, as some critics say, that the movie simplifies our time by proving Forrest's simple homilies ("Death is just a part of life") and self-forgiving formulas ("Stupid is as stupid does"), thereby congratulating the audience for its own supposed ignorance. The movie shows how touching, how human, it is to carry on in the face of war, assassination, disaster and disease, clinging to these lifelines that make us human.

Tom Hanks is at the top of his game right now, with four films in a row that have gotten to the hearts of the audience, making him (dare I say it of a man still young?) beloved. That is partly because he has had luck in his choice of roles, and partly because he was ready to play them. It is also because there is something within Tom Hanks that audiences respond to positively. A movie is a kind of truth machine that allows us to sit in the dark and stare as closely as we like at every nuance of an actor's manner and personality. (When, in real life, do we get to look at anyone that closely?)

Bad guys can become stars, and good guys can come across as jerks. But when a star is sensed to have the same decent qualities as his characters—and those characters strike a chord in our imagination—there is the possibility that a myth will be born, that a Stewart, a Bogart, a Monroe, will be created.

Tom Hanks right now seems to be in the process of such a myth creation. Actors are always at the mercy of their material, their directors, their co-stars, and even of the social atmosphere at the time a movie is released. (Certainly the summer of the 25th anniversary of Woodstock was the perfect time for Forrest Gump.) My notion is that when an actor does something good, he probably deserves praise, but when he does something bad, he may not deserve blame. In the movies, nobody can fake the genuine, but everybody can screw it up. Maybe Hanks has simply been lucky with his four most recent films. Maybe he has developed a gift for being able to look at such unlikely material as Forrest Gump (or even Joe Versus the Volcano) and seeing through the goofiness to the promise. Whatever it is, he has found a way to play a certain kind of character on the screen so that when people leave the theater, they do not think of Tom Hanks or even of Forrest Gump so much as they think of themselves, as if they have just been through something mysterious and important.

"Hanks must be fundamentally a good person, or he is an even better actor than we think."