Maybe he should be called St. Thomas.
Tom Hanks first pierced moviegoers’ hearts as a dutiful mermaid protector in “Splash” and as a man-child adored by all in “Big.” But, last year, his Oscar-winning turn as an AIDS victim in “Philadelphia” and his smash success as a perfect widowed dad in “Sleepless in Seattle” made him a candidate for cinema canonization.
With the recently released “Forrest Gump,” he cements his screen sainthood. In a moving, uncluttered manner, he personifies a slow-witted, good-natured naif who sees only the good in people and who ferociously protects those he loves.
“There is no one else like Tom working today,” says “Gump” co-producer Wendy Finerman. “He has such a likability. As an actor, and as a human being, he’s a dream.”
It’s the same reaction that greeted Julie Andrews after “The Sound of Music” and, as difficult as it is to believe today, Ryan O’Neal after “Love Story.” But if that pair’s careers tapered off after their most popular films, it was because each was handicapped by a limited range. No such handicaps loom for Hanks.
“Right now everyone’s asking me if I’d like to stretch my range and play an evil guy, just for a change of pace.” Hanks says.
“I was courageous in `Philadelphia’ and a wonderful daddy in `Sleepless in Seattle.’ And I’m practically a saint in `Forrest Gump,’ a character I want to do justice to. So to do an evil man right now would seem gimmicky. Someday down the road, I’d like to play someone evil, sure. But I’d want it to be an original. I wouldn’t want to redo Robert Mitchum in `The Night of the Hunter,’ and wind up a pale imitation of someone else’s evil man.”
Hanks has played arrogant (“The Bonfire of the Vanities”), materialistic (“Nothing in Common”), bratty (“Volunteers”) and bitter (“Punchline”). But never evil. After all, this is the man who admits he broke down and sobbed three times while filming a graveyard scene in “Forrest Gump.”
“He connects with everyone,” says Robin Wright, who plays his true love in “Gump.” “The first time I ever met him was when I screen-tested with him for `The Bonfire of the Vanities.’ He tested with all the actresses who were up for Maria. (Melanie Griffith got the part.) It must have been tiring for him. But for me, it was the most humiliating experience of my life.
“We were doing the scene where I try to get him to make love to me, and he’s so nervous about the car accident he can’t respond to me. It was a nightmare for me. And he was so great to me. He sensed how embarrassed I was, and he tried to make me laugh, and I’ve never forgotten that.”
Viewers of this year’s Oscar telecast won’t forget Hanks’ moving acceptance speech for “Philadelphia,” the most talked-about movie in his surprisingly varied career. Honored for playing a gay attorney who is fired when his firm discovers he has AIDS, Hanks won a standing ovation while urging tolerance and remembering a gay drama teacher and classmate who influenced him when he attended high school in Oakland.
Most observers applauded the tearful speech (“The streets of heaven are crowded with angels tonight”) as earnest and heartfelt, but a few denounced it as calculated, a “performance” along the lines of his bravura opera-listening scene in the film.
“There were some phrases that I had worked out beforehand, and there were some that I completely forgot once I got up there on stage,” says the actor. “I felt it was a bit of a responsibility to be in that circumstance and that I should address the greater issue. If you got a transcript, you’d know that it all wound up busted syntax. But a climate of fear has been fostered toward gays. Had I been afraid of my teacher, I could never have learned from him.”
Everyone expected Hanks to win for “Philadelphia,” including Hanks.
“There’s no way you can be blind to those signals. But I’m not under the illusion that I gave without a doubt the best performance of the year. I just realized that Oscar voters liked the way `Philadelphia’ treated its subject.”
Hanks’ Oscar turn would do credit to “Forrest Gump” himself, who goes through life trying to do right by others.
“Forrest is a Zen-like character, but he’s got nothing to go on except common sense,” Hanks says. “There’s not a judgmental bone in his body. I wound up having so many emotions invested in Forrest. I just loved him!”
Hanks is one of the chosen few who can talk about a character’s “Zen-like” qualities and say “I just loved him!” without making you wince. Even in his crass movies (remember the abysmal “Bachelor Party”?), he’s been likable and has registered, perhaps, a spiritual quality.
Unlike many of Hollywood’s top guns, he willingly talks about his religious background: He spent five years as a teen with the First Covenant Church of Oakland.
“It was an evangelical Christian youth group, and it was one of the best things I ever did. I made friends that I still have today. I had been a confused kid. . . Religion helped me.
“I’m still religious, but not as fervently religious as I was then. There is certainly a God to be made peace with, to use Forrest Gump’s phrase. Rita and I go to a Greek Orthodox Church, which is Rita’s church. Our son was baptized in that church. We don’t go every Sunday, but we go fairly often.”
Rita is Hanks’ wife, actress Rita Wilson, who played his “Sleepless in Seattle” pal who sobbed while describing “An Affair to Remember.” They have one son, and he has a son and daughter from an earlier marriage. During the interview, he is expecting a call from Wilson. When the phone rings, he jumps up and answers it expectantly. His smile evaporates when the call is for one of the “Forrest Gump” producers in the next room, but he remains polite.
Only two facets of the new movie frightened him-how to do Forrest’s slow, Southern accent and possible comparisons with “Big,” in which he played a young boy magically transported to a grown man’s body.
“I was afraid of any sort of dialect. I told that to Bob (director Robert Zemeckis) right at the beginning. But Bob insisted, `You gotta do it! You gotta do it!’,” Hanks says.
“Finally, I just copied Michael Humphrey’s cadence,” he says, referring to the 8-year-old Mississippian who plays Forrest as a child. “It came from some magic place inside him.”
Hanks quit worrying about the “Big” comparison before shooting started.
“Forrest and Josh (his “Big” character) are alike in naivete and innocence. But there’s a huge difference between them. Josh is very verbal; Forrest is anything but. Josh is bright; Forrest is simple. But I have this great protective, daddy-ish urge to do right by both of them. When I first read the screenplay to `Big,’ I thought Josh was such a good kid, I wanted to present him on screen without any condescension. You know, a lot of movies about kids really do patronize them, and I was proud that `Big’ did not.”
He was determined to do the same with “Forrest Gump.” “I visited a school in Los Angeles that teaches severely challenged adults. But I did not want to clinically recreate someone. I wanted Forrest to be a complete original.”
And despite superficial comparisons with Peter Sellers in “Being There” and Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man,” Hanks succeeds.
Yet, for much of his career, the actor seemed to be trading on his likability, and he’s had a slew of disappointments. For every “Sleepless in Seattle,” there was a “Joe Versus The Volcano.” What’s worse, for every “Philadelphia,” there was an “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “The ‘Burbs” or “The Money Pit.” And, of course, there was the high-profile debacle “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
“The disappointment of a flop movie only stings for a few weeks, just like the Oscar euphoria only lasts a few weeks. I remember coming out of the shower, having forced myself not to think about `Bonfire,’ having told myself all the usual stuff about everybody having a major flop, and feeling pretty much OK. But the television was on, and one of those morning shows came on, and the blistering review of `Bonfire’ was the first thing on the show, and I went `AAAUUUGGHH!!’
“But by the time the movie came out, most of us knew `Bonfire’ was not a good movie. When everyone looked at it, Brian (director De Palma) said, `Hmmm. It might not be happening.’ Our mistake was that we made big changes in a novel that had entered the national consciousness and failed to pay attention to the minute details that made the novel so great on page.”
But he revived in a big way, as the bombastic alcoholic baseball manager in “A League of Their Own,” followed by star turns in “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Philadelphia.”
His resilient attitude may come from a childhood that seemed designed to teach a kid how to bounce back. Last year, after his performance as what he calls “the perfect daddy” in “Sleepless in Seattle,” friends-including “Sleepless” director Nora Ephron-were quoted as calling the role “ironic” because his childhood was unhappy.
“My childhood was diffused but not dysfunctional,” he says evenly. His parents were divorced when he was young and he moved around with his father, a cook, from one city to another. “My personality is now what it was then. I am not a sad clown, smiling through my tears. My parents pioneered marriage disillusionment procedures. It was odd. It was nomadic. For several months, my father would be working at a country club and then he’d be working at a greasy spoon-type diner. So I was exposed to a lot of different types of people. I just remember that there was always laughter. And my childhood gave me certain strengths. I’m very adaptable. And I have learned to travel very, very light.”
