DVD: Divine Viewing Diversions - Tom Hanks Movies

He’s been an actor for a long, long time.

And, of late, he’s also been a producer and a writer and a director as well.

But it’s Tom Hanks the Movie Star who has had the greatest impact on our popular culture.

And he remains, after all this time, an American icon to be reckoned with, which is why he gets cast as such real-life movie characters as Walt Disney (in “Saving Mr. Banks”) and Mr. Rogers (in “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”).

We continue to look to him to deliver appealing movie characters we can admire and emulate as they display various degrees of decency, reliability, intelligence, resourcefulness, expertise, wisdom and heroism.

For that we say, “Hanks for the Memories,” and offer this chronological tour of his storied career.

BIG (PG, 1988)

Not that Hanks didn’t make a splash in “Splash,” but he became even bigger after “Big,’ a delightful and remarkably watchable fantasy-comedy about a 12-year-old boy who gets his wish to be “big” granted and wakes up one morning as a 30-year-old. The film’s take on innocence is a charmer and Hanks as a man-boy is a walking special effect without any CGI. Thanks to his natural comedic instincts, director Penny Marshall’s sure hand behind the camera, and a breezy, satisfying script, the film earned Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Hanks for Best Actor. If there’s a more familiar, winning and memorable movie scene than Hanks and Robert Loggia dancing on a gigantic piano keyboard, I’m yet to see it. As for the considerable success of the film, both critically and commercially, it helped to establish Hanks as a major talent, a resourceful career actor, and a marquee-name box-office draw.

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN (PG, 1992)

There was a lot to like about Penny Marshall’s terrific baseball comedy, based on and inspired by the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. But nothing could eclipse Hanks’ hilarious portrait of Jimmy Dugan, a drunken, washed-up baseball legend who becomes the manager of a women’s baseball team, one of many that sprang up while male players were away fighting during World War II. It was wise of Hanks to collaborate once again with Marshall and to take a showy supporting role as a tipsy ex-slugger, one that would boost him with a giant step in the direction of the fraternity of A-list leading men. That’s because he, well, knocked it out of the park with a funny, convincing and touching portrayal, during which he helped immortalize the classic, oft-imitated and oft-repeated line, “There’s no crying in baseball,” with a comedic line reading for the ages. Hanks’ comedy chops were now firmly established.

SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE (PG, 1993)

And a leading man is exactly what he became in writer-director Nora Ephron’s ultra-romantic comedy, co-starring Hanks and Meg Ryan in a variation of the classic tearjerker, “An Affair to Remember.” Ryan plays a Baltimore woman recently engaged who hears a single-dad caller from Seattle, played by Hanks, talking about his late wife on a late-night radio show. Convinced that he might be her romantic destiny, she pursues him. Hanks’ likability is perfectly captured by Ephron, and his chemistry with Ryan, despite minimal footage of them at the same place or time, wins the day in an audience-friendly charmer. Hanks is both relaxed and assured as the star of the piece and a valuable member of an effective romcom ensemble. Hanks’ boyishness long since established, this grown-up romp brought his “mannishness” to the table. And with several successful comedies behind him, it was time to turn in a more dramatic direction.

PHILADELPHIA (PG-13, 1993)

More dramatic, indeed. Hanks received his second Oscar nomination and first Oscar as Andrew Beckett, a gay lawyer battling AIDS who is fired for questionable reasons from his law firm on Philadelphia’s Main Line when the firm’s honchos discover he has AIDS. So, Beckett sues them for discrimination, supported by the only lawyer willing – if reluctantly – to take his case, an ambulance chaser played by Denzel Washington. Hanks is magnificent, even if his role in this drama about homophobia is not delineated as completely as we would like. But the film is powerfully effective and affecting, and Hanks is both sympathetic and empathetic, displaying for us the terror, the anger, the intelligence, the physical decline, the righteousness, and the bitterness he feels throughout his life-threatening predicament. And with that, Hanks was a leading man ready for any and all genres.

FORREST GUMP (PG-13, 1994)

Then, as if his accomplishments on the big screen weren’t distinctive enough, Hanks jumped into the record books in a big way. It’s beyond rare for an actor to take home an Oscar two years in a row, but Hanks became only the second actor in movie history to do so (Spencer Tracy was the first). He plays the title role, a slow-witted boy who grows into a man by floating like a feather through a virtual catalog of recent American history. Director Robert Zemeckis masterfully employs digitized imagery so that Forrest can interact with real-life newsmakers, and he gets an indelible performance out of Hanks in a film that takes home the Best Picture Oscar. Meanwhile, Hanks has moviegoers repeating some of his character’s disarming one-liners, such as “Life is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re going to get” and “Stupid is as stupid does,” and even “Run, Forrest, run.” Hanks was on the A-list to stay.

APOLLO 13 (PG, 1995)

Collaborating once again with “Splash” director Ron Howard, Hanks portrayed real-life astronaut Jim Lovell in this absolutely gripping and remarkably suspenseful drama about the ill-fated titular lunar mission and the heroic exploits of Lovell, his colleagues, and the NASA team in Houston. Hanks did not necessarily look or sound like Lovell, but his reputation and big-screen persona made it easy for moviegoers to accept him in the role. Who better to trust with the iconic pronouncement, “Houston, we have a problem,” even if it turns out to be a mild misquotation. (The real Lovell said, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”) But that wouldn’t matter, given that Hanks had the kind of respect and admiration and trust that was pretty much the movie-star equivalent of the public’s feelings about astronauts and perhaps their knowledge of Hanks’ interest in the space program. That is to say, if Hanks was not an actual astronaut, he sure as heck seemed like one. At any rate, he was certainly one of America’s heroes.

TOY STORY (G, 1995)

Surely Hanks’ persona could be “borrowed” for an animated character and that’s exactly what happened with “Toy Story,” the first feature-length, entirely computer-animated film and an instant classic about toys that have lives of their own. It would go on to spawn at least three sequels. Hanks provides the voice and personality of protagonist Woody, a pull-string cowboy doll and the leader of the toys owned by a human named Andy and one that couldn’t help but be Andy’s favorite, even if he’s somewhat threatened by the arrival of Buzz Lightyear, a birthday present in the form of a high-tech space ranger action figure voiced by Tim Allen. Rarely if ever have animated characters been as fully fleshed out as these two marvels. And Hanks delivers with a voice performance that creates a character every bit as vivid and likable and trustworthy and relatable as anything he had done in his live-action works.

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (R, 1998)

Back in serious live-action terrain, Hanks accepted the lead in director Steven Spielberg’s masterful military epic, a role that would win him a fourth nomination as Best Actor. Hanks stars as an Army captain during World War II who is assigned to take his seven-man squad into war-torn France after D-Day in pursuit of the title character, an American private whose three brothers have died in combat. The film is an intense exploration of heroism during combat with a level of authenticity and control that had more than a few viewers deeming it the greatest war movie ever made. If it’s not, it’s close, especially when the film kicks off with a lengthy sequence devoted to the morning of June 6, 1944, as American soldiers land on Omaha Beach as part of the Normandy invasion. As for Hanks’ performance, it was perceived by the public as less challenging than his two Oscar-winning roles but nonetheless successful as Hanks worked with a young ensemble and fit in effectively even as he brought his crucial character to three-dimensional life.

CAST AWAY (PG-13, 2000)

Having done just about everything else on the movie screen, Hanks reunited with “Forrest Gump” director Robert Zemeckis for a virtual one-man show of a survival drama about an airplane-crash survivor and FedEx systems analyst who ends up on a deserted Pacific island all by his lonesome. Only a skilled actor with an Everyman quality and an audience who lives in his corner and instantly cares about him could turn what sounds like an undernourished premise into a stimulating if underpopulated adventure that holds us in its sway as one pair of shoulders keeps the film going and a protagonist easy to root for battles the elements and struggles to maintain his sanity. And, yes, a fifth Oscar nomination for Best Actor would be part of the result in a project that features Hanks on-screen by himself for the vast majority of the time, something that precious few stars would or could have carried off as part of an exploration of the human spirit.

THE DA VINCI CODE (PG-13, 2006)

So familiar and involved with Hanks’ stardom was the vast moviegoing audience that it would be distracted by his new haircut while it sought the narrative pleasures of this adaptation of novelist Dan Brown’s page-turner about a murder committed in the Louvre with links to the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci and ties to the foundations of Christianity. Hanks stars as globetrotting Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, who’s called in to investigate. Here was a thriller that only thrilled half the audience, but one that nonetheless featured a number of welcome surprises and insights. Critics’ opinions notwithstanding, the film was a huge international hit – at least to some degree a testament to Hanks’ unwavering popularity – and Hanks’ Langdon made enough of an impression to return with director Ron Howard in two sequels, “Angels & Demons” and “Inferno.” This was a showcase for Hanks the star as opposed to Hanks the actor, but the pleasure of his company remained unassailable.