Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (21 page)

The real Tom Hanks was born thirty-eight years ago in Oakland, California, and attended California State College in Sacramento, where he took drama classes, acted in Ibsen, and met a man named Vincent Dowling, who was 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 Two Gentlemen of Verona). The great British actors often begin their careers at Stratford; it is somehow just like the man who would play Forrest Gump that he began in Shakespeare, too, but in Cleveland.

After time on the stage in New York, Hanks moved to Los Angeles, and was cast in Bosom Buddies on ABC during the 1981-82 season. He already seemed like a seasoned comedy pro, comfortable in his persona, as a Catholic school-bus driver who gets engaged in the underrated Bachelor Party (1984), his first role of any consequence. And later the same year he played the lead in Splash. There was no long period of bit roles and starvation; he was a star at twenty-eight.

I still feel he was cast incorrectly in Splash, the comedy where he fell in love with a mermaid played by Daryl Hannah. His brother in the film was the fat and genial John Candy, who spent his days composing inflamed letters to sex magazines, and I thought it would have been funnier if the mermaid (who had never seen a human male before) 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 in the early scenes he plays a pintsized adolescent. (If you think this is easy, see how Martin Short handled it in Clifford.) He is at just that age when all of the girls in his class shoot up into Amazons, while the boys remain short and squeaky-voiced. At an amusement park, he is in line next to the girl of his dreams, and hopes to sit next to her on a thrill ride, but the ride operator won't let him on board because he's too short. Hanks's face is a study in tragedy here; he portrays his humiliation so completely that it sets up the rest of the film, as his thirteen year-old mind is magically transported into a thirty-year-old body, and he finds his true calling-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 like the one where he hops, skips, and jumps through the company's lobby.

Joe vs. the Volcano, which was written and directed by John Patrick Shanley (the 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 an island of calm and sanity in the middle of 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.

The role in the hands of another actor would have been impossible, because there is never a moment when the character can find an anchor to reality. Hanks does not need one. The key to his performance here 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's 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, and when he finds himself coaching a team of women, his strategy is to simply 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 which has fired him, the Hanks character has two major characteristics: pride, and anger. Either of these is an easy excuse for overacting, but Hanks understands here, as he did in the very different A League of Their Own, 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 having to do very much, externally, to explain his emotions.

Hanks's most memorable scene in Philadelphia is the one where he plays a recording of an aria from the opera Andrea Chenier for his lawyer (Denzel Washington), and while it's playing, provides a heartbreaking running commentary. The aria is sung to her lover by a French noblewoman 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 condition of Hanks's own character. Instead, by explaining it to his lawyer, what the dying man is saying 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, in the gay world which you are also so apart from. 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 note of a teacher; he wants to share something that 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's decision to star in Philadelphia because he thus became, in a phrase that became much-used, the first major 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 have happily 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 which Hanks occupied in the final scenes?

In accepting the Academy Award for Philadelphia, Hanks made a speech which will rank among Oscar's odder moments. Some, listening to it at the time, were moved by his tribute to those who had died from AIDS, and who the movie sought to remember. Others, including those who read it in transcript, were frankly unable to make much sense of it. I was reminded of Laurence Olivier's famous acceptance speech after they gave him an honorary Oscar. 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," 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. His ability to do that convincingly is one of the reasons Hanks is able to made Forrest a human being and not a case study.

Still, 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's secret was to do, as nearly as possible, 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 seventy-five and a limited vocal range, he sits or stands impassively, usually wearing that uniform of a blue shirt buttoned at the collar, and speaks dispassionately, unaware that he has somehow been placed at the center of all of the key events of recent American history.

Looking at the film, I found that my theory would not hold. What on a first viewing looked like a one-note performance was revealed, during this later viewing, as wide-ranging but so enormously subtle that the range is there almost without our realizing it. One of the reasons 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 where he runs and runs (from bullies, on the football field, in Vietnam, and then across America), his face seems set. The closest Hanks comes to physical acting is in the miraculous special-effects scenes, where director Robert Zemeckis and his technicians place Hanks in the same video frames with JFK, John Lennon, LBJ, and George Wallace. Here he does a perfect job of affecting the slight stiffness and formality that people adopt in the presence of the famous, as if standing at attention.

To understanding the soul of Hanks's performance in the movie, what you have to do is listen to his voice. There are a lot of lines people remember from the film; his momma's sayings, of course, and his own philosophical insights ("You do the best with what God gave you"). But listen to the line he uses on the night 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 hear that he subtly but firmly emphasizes the beats of both love and is, making them ab solutely equal, and a little more stressed that 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. The delivery prevents the line from sounding like pleading. It is a statement of fact, and by the quiet emphasis he puts on it, we sense how very strongly he feels.

Or listen to what he says on his wedding day, when Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise) arrives, walking on artificial legs, and introduces Forrest to his fiancee. The line is simply, "Lieutenant Dan!" Two words, but invested with affection, a teasing quality, and relief that Lieutenant Dan has escaped his demons. After the movie I tried to imitate the way Hanks said the name, and I failed. I could never get more than one note in at a time.

Forrest's voice is what carries the movie. He narrates it, he speaks in it, 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, and so he doesn't go for it. To punch the line would imply that Forrest knows it is funny, and of course that would be a mistake-a mistake Hanks is too good to make.

Any successful movie invites nay-saying, and I've read criticism of the film as an insult to the mentally retarded, as a right-wing vision of America disguised in liberal clothing, and as a free ride on the coattails of our nostalgia. One critic thought it was 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, it was that he was there. Forrest is a Witness, careening from one historical milestone to another, j ust as all of us are. If he has no control over the events in his society, neither do we. It isn't true, as some critics say, that the movie simplifies our time by providing Forrest's simple homilies ("Death is just a part of life") and self-forgiving formulas ("Stupid is as stupid does"), thereby congratulating the audience on its own supposed ignorance. What the movie does is show 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 gone straight into the hearts of the audience, making him (dare I say of a man still young?) beloved. That is partly because he has had good 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. The movies are kind of a truth machine, allowing 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 ever 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 rare qualities of the characters he plays, and when those characters strike a chord in the audience's imagination, then 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 mythcreation. Actors are always at the mercy of their material, their directors, their costars, and even the social atmosphere at the time a movie is released. (Certainly the twenty-fifth anniversary summer of Woodstock was the perfect time for Forrest Gump to be playing.) 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-because in the movies, nobody can fake the genuine, but everybody can screw it up. Maybe Hanks has simply been lucky, with these four films. Maybe he has developed some kind of gift for being able to look at such unlikely material as Forrest Gump (or even Joe vs. 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, in such a way that when the audience leaves 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.