Normally, the first week of September is a quiet one in theaters, but this year, something sort of special is happening. For the first time, two true American icons, among the biggest movie stars we’ve ever had, are brought together, with two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks (who was the first person to win back-to-back awards since Spencer Tracy) uniting with director/screen legend Clint Eastwood for “Sully,” a biopic of the pilot who landed a stricken plane on the Hudson on January 15, 2009.
It’s not a film that will go down in legend, but per our review from Telluride over the weekend, it’s one of the better recent Eastwood pics, and once again sees an “impressive” performance from Hanks that could see him back in the awards mix. And there are few people who would complain about that: while some of his contemporaries or near-contemporaries like Tom Cruise, Will Smith, or Russell Crowe attract as many haters as fans, it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t like Hanks.
Now 60 years old, Hanks began his career in cross-dressing sitcom “Bosom Buddies,” before breaking through to features at age 28 with Ron Howard’s surprise smash “Splash” and sex comedy “Bachelor Party.” He became initially known for charming turns in likable comedies, with “Big” the biggest of them, but by the end of the 1990s was doing more dramatic fare, and won his back-to-back Oscars in 1993 and 1994 for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump.”
As comfortable in a Carly Rae Jepsen video as in a prestigious Steven Spielberg-directed drama, Hanks has become more of a risk-taker in recent years (though “Sully” is perhaps not the prime example of that…), all the while building out a formidable producing career on the side through his Playtone label, responsible for backing films including “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and “Mamma Mia!.”
We hopefully have many more years of Hanks to come (he’ll reprise the role of Robert Langdon in Ron Howard’s “Inferno” next month, and has James Ponsoldt’s eagerly-anticipated “The Circle” to come after that), but to mark the release of “Sully,” we’ve picked and ranked our ten favorite performances from one of our finest. Take a look below, and let us know what you would have gone for in the comments.
10. Ray Peterson in “The ‘Burbs” (1989)
A strange mix of tones and genres, “The ‘Burbs” was only a middling success on release, its cult status being hard-won and relatively recent. It’s completely understandable why it would be overlooked, but despite its disparate elements, it’s enormously enjoyable, and serves as a deeply underrated Hanks performance, one that played a key part in his development as a performer. Before it, Hanks was known mostly for playing relatively straight-laced, all-American roles, good guys through and through. And mostly in genial family comedies, too, with only a few more dramatic roles, none of which are fondly remembered (Israel-set military romance “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” anyone?). And Joe Dante’s “The ‘Burbs” looked on the surface like that kind of film, a gentle suburban satire not far from something like “The Money Pit,” at least at first glance. But this being Dante, it was anything but: with an EC Comics darkness lingering below the surface, Dante brought some Hitchcock and some William Castle and some Chuck Jones to the party. And though Hanks at first feels like he’s doing his button-downed, straight-laced thing, he rises to Dante’s challenge and lets his freak flag fly. Even in a career where he was constantly compared to the actor, it might be his most Jimmy Stewart-esque turn, but this is quietly unhinged, like if Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window” was possessed by the spirit of Jimmy Stewart in “Vertigo,” and also Bugs Bunny. It’s, with the previous year’s “Punchline,” the real birth of Hanks as more than just a comic lead.
9. Professor Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr in “The Ladykillers” (2004)
Given that it was the first teaming of some of the greatest American filmmakers with one of the greatest American movie stars, on a remake of one of the greatest black comedies ever made, the 2004 edition of “The Ladykillers” felt like a crushing disappointment. Moving the Ealing classic about a crew of bank robbers holed up in the home of an elderly lady to Louisiana, it’s almost universally acknowledged as the least of the Coen Brothers’ films, with a strange tone-deaf quality and false-ringing broadness that’s almost unique among their work. So what on earth is it doing here? Well, for all the film’s other flaws, Hanks is terrific in the film. His Prof. Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr takes the malevolence of Alec Guinness’s turn in the original and puts it in very different clothes, feeling equal parts Dracula and Foghorn Leghorn, and somehow making that combination of people makes sense. It’s a rare movie appearance that lets him show off the sketch comedy chops that’s made him such a valuable “SNL” guest over the years, and a reminder that we’d love to see him do full-on silly comedy more often, especially with a turn as specific and deliciously evil as this one — just hopefully in a better movie next time.