Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (20 page)

Lee looked pleased by what he was about to say. "That's one thing I refused to do. I refused to test-market this film. I am not one of these directors who likes some marketing genius to say, `Well, Spike, it says here 39 percent of the people liked this and 42 percent liked that.' This film, I was going with my gut. I've done test-marketing on my other films but there's too much riding at stake on this one and I don't want to be subjected to any marketing research bullshit."

The more you had riding on the film, the less you wanted research.

"Exactly. That's definitely what I felt. Denzel and me, our necks were literally on the line. And if we gotta go down, let it be because it's our vision on the screen, not some committee."

INTRODUCTION

t is useful to remember what an impact Forrest Gump had when it was first released. It was a film that audiences simply loved. It vaulted over the head of the teenage audience directly into the hearts of adults who might go to the movies once or twice a year, but had heard they must see this one.

I was asked by Playboy to do a profile about Tom Hanks, and wrote it without interviewing the actor. I had interviewed him before and would again; he is the most affable and decent of men, amused, civilized, funny, but for this piece I didn't want to ask him questions. I just wanted to write about him.

SUMMER 1994

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 like a lightning rod for anyone who has just seen a movie: they tell me if they liked it or not, as if I'd made it myself. Not in twenty-seven years on the job has a movie created more conversation among ordinary people, among the folks who only go to two or three movies a year. They j ust plain love it. More, they are moved by it, and they get a funny smile on their face when they talk about it, because they do not know why they are moved. The film doesn't deliver in any conventional way, and they are not quite sure what it's about. But it gets to them.

And then they mention Tom Hanks, who plays Forrest Gump, and 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 couldn't capture him in the act of doing it, and 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 in the movie. He may even win the Oscar for best actor, which would make it two in a row, after his award in April 1994 for Philadelphia, the 1993 film where he played a man dying of AIDS. In the summer of 1993, 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, while the audience, which knows everything, desperately wants him to be happy. The summer before that, in 1992, Hanks played the manager of an all-girl 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 are discouraging in Hollywood, which uses formulas and deals and habit patterns to push even the most original projects into narrow channels. The odds against making four in a row, four movies where 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. Hanks has done it.

Tom Hanks right now is in the unique position of being the bestloved movie actor in America, and 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.

Is there even, for that matter, a character that can be described as a "Tom Hanks type"? Hanks has rarely in his career played ordinary, realistic, three-dimensional human beings. There is usually an edge of fantasy, magic, winsome humor, or otherworldly detachment about his most successful roles. The major exception, his full-hearted excursion into straight realism, is in Philadelphia, where AIDS is fighting his character for possession of his body, and where, in scenes like the luminous sickbed conversation with his mother (Joanne Woodward), he touches notes that everyone can identify with. He's also living in the real world in Nothing in Common (1987), as a cynical, fast-talking ad man who's too busy for family values, until he learns his dad (Jackie Gleason) is sick; then he discovers what's really important in life. In his upcoming 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 global nail-biter. The movie is being directed by Ron Howard, who likes to go for an everydaylife 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 Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, or De Niro specialize in. Tom Hanks is not and never could be Travis Bickle. More often, the Hanks character in a movie is like the 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. In a silent film, many of the characters played by Hanks would be introduced with a card reading simply, The Young Man. To a surprising extent, most of his successful movie roles are in fantasies.

In Splash (1984), his first big role, he costars with a mermaid. He is a bachelor who runs a business in Manhattan, and might be mistaken for an ordinary guy, if it weren't for the mermaid, and for a certain dreamy quality that the producers must have seen when they cast him: he's the kind of guy you can somehow imagine in love with a mermaid.

In Dragnet (1987), he is sergeant Joe Friday's partner, whose great 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, to ever be mistaken for real cops. Webb's TV series was a satire of itself, with every scene ending in a punch line and the Dragnet theme, and in the movie you can sense Hanks subtly stiffening himself into a parody.

Big (1988) has one of his best performances, as a child who is granted his wish of inhabiting an adult's body. In The Burbs (1989), he's a goofy suburbanite who skips his vacation to stay home and spy on his bizarre neighbors. In the magical and overlooked Joe vs. the Volcano (1990), he is the central figure in a fable: A victim of overwork in a factory dungeon, 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: his widower in that movie quits his Chicago job and takes his young son and moves to a houseboat in Seattle, where he spends most of the movie trapped in a plot only the audience understands-a plot that manipulates him so that he becomes the 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 j ust beyond our grasp. His character's philosophy in that movie could be borrowed from Forrest Gump's mother: "Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get."

Tom Hanks in his key roles plays a sort 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. "I don't know if we each have a destiny," Forrest Gump says, "or if we're floating and accidental, like on a breeze, but I think like maybe it's both-both happening at the same time." And the film's famous opening and closing shots of a feather, at the mercy of the wind, is the right image to go with that thought.

If there is a common theme to a Hanks character, an element that draws him to certain roles, it may be the element of fable. Fables teach a lesson in mythical terms, and there is something of the moral and the myth lurking beneath the surfaces of his key films: Splash, Big, Nothing in Common, Joe vs. the Volcano, Sleepless in Seattle, and of course Forrest Gump. It is even there in The Bonfire of the Vanities, which is among other things a sermon against greed.

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 when you're up there on the screen, 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. (That is why we never care as deeply about TV stars as about movie stars.)

There is a smaller category, however, of actors who are not "bigger than life," but somehow just like life-people we feel we know and understand, and are comfortable with. We sense that these actors embody not our fantasies, but our lives. Watching them we feel congratulated, because we are watching ourselves. They reassure us that in our ordinariness we also have a kind of importance. The actors who can do that-Buster Keaton, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman, and Tom Hanks-occupy a special category. We do not value them as highly as such performers as James Cagney, Mitchum, James Dean, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Tom Cruise, or Sean Penn, because it seems to us they aren't "acting," but embodying qualities which must not be very special to possess, since, after all, we possess them ourselves.

The central triumph of Tom 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, but that he somehow does it on a larger or more ennobling scale. It is the James Stewart quality. But 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 a fundamentally 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. These are artificial situations, where he gets to choose how he presents himself, and what he chooses is to be very level-headed 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. On Letterman and Leno, he's very 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 is the best bullshit detector among the TV talk hosts, but Hanks, who as a big movie star should be a ripe target, finesses him with understatement, directness, and irony. It is all done so well that we realize only later we learned nothing at all about "Tom."