The Meaning of History: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (Part VIII)

<<< previous post

In 1995, Tom Hanks played Jim Lovel, the famous commander of the Apollo 13 lunar mission, in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13. This critically acclaimed film would go on to win two Academy Awards (nominated for 9), two British Academy Film Awards, and the Silver Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. The movie would gross over $355 million during the course of its theatrical release, and in 2023 the US National Film Registry selected it for preservation as a film of cultural and historical significance.

It is also significnat as the first of many subsequent historical dramas which the prolific actor would go on to make. In addition to Apollo 13, the full list of real-life people Tom Hanks has portrayed on screen includes: Charlie Wilson, the US Congressman who organized American support of Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan war (Charlie Wilson’s War), Captain Philips, the American merchant mariner who was kidnapped by Somali Pirates in 2009 (Captain Philips), Walt Disney, the film-making visionary who brought Mary Poppins to the screen (Saving Mr. Banks), James Donovan, the lawyer who negotiated the exchange of Soviet and American spies in 1957 (Bridge of Spies), Sully Sullenberger, the pilot who landed a passenger plane on the on the Hudson River in 2009 (Sully), Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post who worked to break the Watergate Scandal in 1966 (The Post), Mr. Rogers, circa his 1998 Esquire magazine interview (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), and Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s notorious and dubious manager from 1955-77 (Elvis). Add to this the roles he played that were not, strictly speaking, historical figures, but were inspired by historical events, like Victor Navroski in The Terminal, or Carl Hanratty in Catch Me if You Can, and the full count of historical films he’s made clocks in at something over a dozen.

While each of these films handle their historical source material in their own unique ways, when you watch them back-to-back (the way my wife and I did in 2023), a number of consistent themes begin to emerge; Tom Hanks seems to have a particular “view of history” that informs his approach to the historical parts he’s cast to play. To begin with, it stands out remarkably how each of these characters made history especially by displaying great resilience in the face of daunting odds. With the exception, perhaps of Colonel Tom Parker, they are all characters who unexpectedly find themselves in emotionally taxing situations, and whatever mark they leave on history is really just the imprint of their courage and determination—Captain Sully’s calmness under the pressure of a failed plane engine, James Donovan’s commitment to uphold the law despite the political backlash, Ben Bradlee’s dogged determination to get the story of Watergate out no matter the cause. Neither is it simply courage in the abstract that he tends to draw out of these historical characters. More specifically, it is their moral courage: their dedication to principles and their commitment to virtues that inspire them to take history-making stands and make history-defining decisions.

If “history” has any over-arching meaning as a singular force in the films of Tom Hanks, it is, primarily, the arena in which the moral grit of individual lives are tested, proven, and, most importantly, memorialized.

From a Christian perspective, Tom Hanks’s interest in playing historical figures deserves special notice, since “history” has always played an important role in the Christian understanding of the spiritual life. The God of the Christian is no abstract deity, unaffected by the vicissitudes of history and standing off at some great remove, watching it all unfold dispassionately. He is, rather, a God of history, who has acted in history, and is, ultimately, sovereign over history. This is the meaning, for instance, of the scroll with the seven seals that we glimpse in the Book of Revelation; this is why a book like the Gospel of Luke takes such pains to historically situate the story of Jesus; this is one of the underlying meanings of the incarnation itself. Not for nothing does Paul insist that God sent his Son into the world “at just the right time” (Rom 5:6-8). Like a good Tom Hanks movie, the Christian Faith is also deeply interested in history—what does it mean, how does it influence the human heart, and where, ultimately, is it going?

Ultimately the Christian answer to those questions differs from anything we find in a Tom Hanks film. As I discussed in a previous post, very few of his films have much interest in exploring the idea that there might be something Divine taking responsibility for the world, a some Omniscient and Omnipotnet One, moving it all towards some higher purpose. But be that as it may, I think a Christian reading of the filmography of Tom Hanks would find much to resonate with, in his view of history as the backdrop against which people enact the stories that display their moral fibre. Only—the Christian would add—the full meaning of those stories, and the real value of that fibre, will not be fully seen until history itself is finally consummated by God in Christ.

In the meantime, though, I think there’s something to be learned in the way a good Tom Hanks character gives shape to the meaning of history, by responding to its unexpected and often overwhelming events with great integrity and principled grit.

next post >>>

The Trajectory of a Tragicomic: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (VII)

<<< previous post

Because Tom Hanks went on to enjoy block-buster success in iconic dramatic roles like Apollo 13 and Forrest Gump, it’s easy to forget the fact that he actually got his start in comedies. His first lead role, of course, was in the quirky 1984 romantic comedy, Splash! After that came the raunchy sex comedy, Bachelor Party, then the bizarre comedy-as-spy-thriller, The Man with One Red Shoe. His first dramatic role didn’t come until 1986, when he played an advertising executive estranged from his philandering father, in Jacky Gleason’s final movie, Nothing in Common. He also did an obscure World War II film called Every Time We Say Goodbye, in 1986, but these dramatic efforts were all eclipsed by the movie that made him a household name, 1988s Big.

Tom Hanks’ career in dramatic roles didn’t begin in earnest until 1993, when he starred in both the whimsical romance, Sleepless in Seattle and the poignant legal drama, Philadelphia. He would follow those up in 1994 with Forrest Gump and Apollo 13, krazy-gluing his name to the dramatic roles and epic biopics that would turn him into an icon. But in the decade leading up to those monumental dramas, Hanks starred in 15 films, 11 of which were comedies.

I feel there is something profoundly fitting in this fact, that one of Hollywood’s most recognizable dramatic actors got his start playing comedic roles. In retrospect, many of these films seem rather cringeworthy today (like 1985s Volunteers). A few of them are blush-inducing (like 1984s Bachelor Party). And almost none of them have aged especially well. Dragnet (1987) trades primarily on juvenile sexual humor; The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) is almost unwatchable in the era of Black Lives Matter; and the plot of Big (1988), when you dissect it, has all sorts of creepy implications that are probably best left unmentioned.

What is fascinating about this body of work in total, however, is the way the development of Hanks’s career reflects the trajectory of cultural sensibilities from the 80s to the present time. Inasmuch the 80s, as a decade, was emerging from the sexual liberation and drug experimentation that shook American culture in the 60s and 70s, it was, in many ways, a decade of hedonistic abandonment and easy joviality. The Vietnamese war had ended, the era of the personal computer was dawning, and the possibilities, it seemed were endless. Comedies in the 80s were willing to laugh at male sexcapades that today we would frown upon (I think rightly) as misogynistic; they were willing to make jokes about ethnic differences between people that today would be censured (again, I think rightly) as xenophobic.

The era of the 80s matured into the brooding, grungy 90s, of course, with its burgeoning social consciousness and its rejection of the glam, the glitz and the glare of the 80s aesthetic. Then, in the 2000s we faced the Y2K scare, the horrors of 9/11, the Gulf War, the War on Terror, and the first tangible, unignorable signs that the climate disaster they’d been warning us about for years might really be upon us.

Then came: #MeToo, BLM, Covid-19, I Can’t Breathe, MAGA, January 1st.

Some 40 years after Tom Hanks first starred as the star-struck lover in Splash! it almost seems quaintly naïf, the ease with which that film, back then, makes jokes about a prebuescent boy trying to sneak a peak at some women’s panties (per the opening scene of the film). And it would seem quaint, perhaps, if it didn’t also seem so grimly misogynistic and objectifying.

What is interesting, though, is that even as American culture was forming its conscience over these last four decades, Tom Hanks was gradually getting out of the comedy business, and stepping into much more dramatic, socially aware, culturally responsible roles. It started small, with a movie about women who could play baseball as well as any man, then the one about the gay man who was unjustly fired from his job, then the one about the band of duty-bound soldiers trying to save a US private named Ryan.

I find Hanks's filmmaking trajectory especially interesting because in literary terms, comedy is far more than just a story that makes you laugh. Northrop Frye, one of the 20th Century’s most respected literary critics, famously pointed out that what makes a story a comedy is the trajectory it follows, starting from a place of “old order”—structure and established tradition—descending into chaos where the old order is shaken, disrupted, and inverted—and emerging on the other side with a “new order” established, the old order subverted and done away with, and the new revealed to the great delight of all.

If Northrop Frye was on to anything with this general sketch of the comic archetype, it seems to me that Tom Hanks’ filmography follows something like a comic trajectory. It begins with the easy hedonism of the 80s—the “old order,” in which men and women had quite distinctly defined roles, so clearly defined that no one would hesitate to laugh at a joke about a man sexually mistreating a woman. In this “old order,” too, ethnic groups were easily slotted and categorized according to any number of unquestioned racial stereotypes and prejudices—so “easily,” in fact, that a film like Volunteers or The Bonfire of the Vanities could be made without anyone batting an eye.

Somewhere around the making of A League of Their Own, however, you see Hanks’s filmmaking descend into—not exactly comic chaos, necessarily, but certainly a chaotic exploration of these prejudices and assumptions, a shaking of this “old order” through a series of films that start to ask if there might be a different way to think about relationships between men and women, or people of different ethnic backgrounds, or sexual minorities.

Not that Tom Hanks’s films are marked by any distinct social consciousness. What I am describing, instead, is the growing social conscience of the culture beginning to seem into the movies he was making, as he started to take on more and more dramatic roles. Many of these later films still had strongly comic elements, certainly, but we begin to see a clear attempt to handle the comedy more responsibly, emerging in his films somewhere around 1993.

At the risk of reading far too much into the filmography of Tom Hanks, it makes me wonder what “new order” will emerge, in the coming years, from all the cultural questioning and political correcting we’ve seen over the last many decades. And if a new order does indeed emerge from chaos we’re going through, how will that, too, be reflected in the films of so prolific an actor as Tom Hanks (assuming, of course, that he is still making films when whatever it is we’re marching towards finally comes into view)?

I probably have read too much, here, into the lifework of an actor whose primary claim to fame, probably, is how truly innocuous his movies tend to be. However, at the risk of grossly over doing it, I will point out that Northrop Frye, the same critic who said that “real” comedy is about the trajectory from “old order,” through “chaos” to “new order,” he also suggested that the truest “comedy” we have is, in fact, the story told by the sacred book of the Christian faith: the Bible.

Because it describes an epic spiritual journey from an “old order” of sin and death and inevitable law, through a cross-shaped chaos to a new order—indeed, a new creation—on the other side, Frye suggested, the Bible may actually contain the most genuinely comic tale ever told.

If it's true, then perhaps Tom Hanks has unwittingly given us a small, imperfect analogy for the Good Book, in his own 4-decade-long journey from old to new order through a kind of filmmaking chaos.

next post >>>

In the Hands of Destiny: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (VI)

<<< previous post

One of the most intriguing movies I came across in my year-long journey through the complete filmography of Tom Hanks was 2012s Cloud Atlas. This surreal sci-fi thriller had somehow escaped my notice when it was first release over a decade ago, so I sat down to it last year with next to no expectations, save what I’d learned from the first few lines of the synopsis on Wikipedia: that it is an “epic science fiction film” with a story that “jumps between eras, spanning hundreds of years, until each storyline eventually resolves,” and that “writings from characters in prior storylines are found in future storylines,” and that “characters appear to recur in each era, but change relationships to each other.” 

I’d left off reading at that point, for fear of spoilers.

I’m not exactly sure what I had been expecting, I was completely caught off guard by the film's exquisitely structured and decidedly philosophical exploration of the interconnectedness of human life. From the harrowing journey of Adam Ewing, an American abolitionist in 1849, to the cloak-and-dagger exploits of an investigative journalist uncovering the corruption of Big Oil in 1970s San Francisco—from the poignant story of Robert Frobisher, a bisexual English composer creating his musical masterpiece in 1936, to the heartbreaking story of a humanoid clone named Somni-451, leading an uprising against her human over-lords in a dystopian Seoul, Korea in 2144—each story line is utterly distinct from one another in tone and tenor, and yet profoundly connected and intricately interwoven.

If you had the heart to trace the threads, for instance, you could see how Adam Ewing’s denouncement the 19th Century Slave Trade becomes a seed that will eventually bear the fruit of Somni-451’s revolution in Neo-Seoul, some 300 years later; or how the story of Zachry Bailey, who contacts an extraterrestrial civilization called the Prescients and so escapes a post-apocalyptic planet earth in 2321, has, as its historical impetus, the plaintive notes of Robert Frobisher’s 1936 magnum opus, “The Cloud Atlas Sextet,” which he composed almost 400 years earlier. As it weaves together these seemingly disparate stories, the film explores some profoundly metaphysical concepts, like the illusion of free will, the so-called “butterfly effect” of human action, the ephemeral nature of reality, and the meaning of history. There are even some mystical ideas with a distinctly eastern flavor, about the existence of the over-soul, the possibility of reincarnation, and the inexorable force of karma.

Although anyone of these ideas would bear a deeper discussion in a series about “spiritual reflections on the filmography of Tom Hanks,” what especially stood out to me in Cloud Atlas was the compelling questions it raises about the idea of destiny—the niggling sense we sometimes get that the course of our lives are actually being directed by forces beyond us, for purposes above us, and that the story we are living is really just a chapter in a much larger narrative that started long before us and won’t be complete until we’ve added our personal pages to the book. Whatever other questions Cloud Atlas may be asking, one of its core questions, it seems to me, is simply this: is there such a thing as “destiny” and, if so, how does it influence the course of individual lives?

Although it perhaps finds its most mystical expression in this film, the idea that one's life might be subject to the forces of "destiny" was a notion that had lingering in the background of a all sorts of Tom Hanks movies, long before Cloud Atlas hit the screen. Sleepless in Seattle wonders out loud, for instance, if there could be such a force pushing perfect strangers together until they become meant-to-be lovers. The characters in Forrest Gump find themselves unwittingly influencing the epoch-marking moments of American history in a way that could only be explained if there was some invisible hand directing them to do so. And in the final scene of Cast Away, Chuck Noland final delivers the FedEx package he had been carrying with him through his entire ordeal in a way that implies both that he was destined to receive the package and destined to deliver it when he was finally rescued.

If there were any connecting ligaments between all the movies in the Tom Hanks filmography, surely this question is one of them: Is destiny a thing, and do we, as individuals, have one?

As a Christian, I want to answer this question with a very qualified “yes”; certainly, the basic assumption of the Christian faith is that God is sovereign over his creation. Christians, of course, have arrived at a wide range of conclusions as to what God's “sovereignty” actually means, how to understand it, and how to explain it in relation to the many things that happen in the world that seem not to be God’s will. But even so, most Christians would agree in broad strokes with basic claim: that the Lord reigns (let the earth be glad). If God is sovereign, though, then in some sense we can say that he has a purpose for his Creation, and even for us his individual children. Each one of our days were written in his book, claims the Psalmist, before any of them came to be.

If there really is an unseen hand guiding the course of our lives, a Christian would say, the fingerprints of that hand must be those of the Lord God himself, and its shape is none other than the nail-pierced palm of His Son Jesus Christ.

I did, however, qualify my “yes" to the question posed by movies like Cloud Atlas. Because equally important to the biblical witness is the affirmation—a stunning affirmation, when you begin to delve its implications—that human beings actually have free will. Again: different Christians will explain this in different ways, and hold it in different kinds of tension with the Bible’s teaching on God’s sovereignty. But the idea that God created human beings with free will is embedded in the very first stories of the biblical text. Not for nothing was there a tree planted in the Garden that Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat from, and only because they had been created free did they choose to do so, having their eyes opened to the difference between good and evil.

If there is such a thing as destiny, then, the biblical witness does not portray it as some nameless, faceless, inexorable force, pushing us to conclusions we simply can’t avoid—ultimately, the view of destiny we find in the films of Tom Hanks is a rather pagan idea. In the Christian view, destiny is what happens when a personal, loving God works wisely and patiently with our decisions, and actions, and circumstances, moving our stories forward towards his good purposes, genuinely honoring the freedom he gave us when he brought us into the world, while still, mysteriously, and inexplicably, working all things together for the good of those who love him.

next post >>>

Ordinary People: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (V)

<<< previous post

One of my favorite books in the Old Testament is the Book of Ruth, that exquisite Hebrew short story tucked away between the Book of Judges and 1 Samuel. This may seem like an odd choice for me to place on a top ten list, given that more often than not Ruth is the focus of women’s Bible studies about the faithful heroines of the Bible, studies that are not primarily written with a 49-year-old male like me in mind. However, I had the opportunity to teach a Bible college course on the traditional “Five Scrolls,” the Megilloth of the Hebrew Bible (Song of Songs, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther and Ruth), and the time I spent in Ruth preparing for that study opened up this deceptively simple love story in ways I had never seen it before.

There are many reasons I’ve come to appreciate the Book of Ruth, but high among them all is the fact that the tale it tells is, in one sense, so very ordinary; one of the most ordinary stories in the Old Testament. There are no earth-moving miracles in Ruth, just supposedly “chance” encounters in unexpected places. There are no theophanic manifestations of the divine glory, just everyday people doing everyday things. There are no epic battles between opposing armies, no fascinating court intrigues, no feats of outrageous heroism or villainy.

The ordinariness of the book stands out all the more remarkably when you consider its place in the cannon. It comes right before 1 Samuel, with its glorious saga of David’s ascension to the throne, filled with prophetically summoned thunderstorms, stand-offs against giants, demonic soothsayers and more. Similarly, it comes just after the Judges, a book that lays out in graphic detail the unprecedented spiritual corruption of Israel in the days when they had no king and everyone did as they pleased. Like 1 Samuel, Judges has its fair share of miracles—divinely empowered strongmen, divinely wrought victories over heathen invaders, divinely orchestrated encounters with heavenly messengers, and so on.

In contrast to all this, however, in Ruth we have a faithful widow who sticks by her mother-in-law during a famine, who travels with her to the village of Bethlehem, who wins the heart of a well-off local farmer, who secures his hand in marriage, and who (as the dramatic conclusion to these exciting events) has a baby.

It’s barely dramatic enough to warrant a Hallmark Movie, though it is told with such theological sophistication that millennia of readers have been blessed and intrigued by it.

The book makes many important theological points, points about the sovereignty of God in the midst of loss and grief, points about the Lord’s hidden but inexorable work to bring Messiah into the world, points about the call to live obediently in step with Torah as a response to the widespread moral degeneracy and spiritual corruption of the world. There is one point that stands out among all these points, though, and artfully unifies them all: that God is powerfully present in the ordinary stuff of life. Everyday acts of living well, simple gestures of hospitality, commonplace encounters in ordinary places—these are often the circumstances where God is most vividly evident and most mysteriously at work.

This is a blog series on the filmography of Tom Hanks, though, not a post about Old Testament heroes of the Faith. The reason I’m unpacking this particular theme from Ruth, though—that God is often most evident in the most ordinary stuff of life—is because it brushes up against, and illuminates, a theme that I see often expressed in the films of Tom Hanks.

When you watch the actor’s whole life’s work, you begin to notice how ordinary so many of his characters are, or at least how everyday the circumstances are that begin their story, even if the story that unfolds in any particular film is far from ordinary, when it’s all said and done.

Joe vs. the Volcano starts with the phrase, “Once upon a time there was a guy named Joe, who had a very lousy job,” inviting viewers to understand that the film they are about to see is really just the story of an “ordinary Joe.”

In Saving Private Ryan, Captain Miller’s men have a running bet, trying to guess what Miller did as a civilian before the war. Given that he is a recipient of the congressional medal of honor, most assume he must have some dramatic back story—Reiben speculates that he was “assembled at O.C.S. out of spare body parts from dead G. I.s.” To their no small surprise, they find out towards the middle of the film that he was “nothing more” than an ordinary English Teacher from Addley, Pennsylvania.

In Cast Away, Chuck Noland is nothing but an ordinary FedEx systems analyst when his ordeal begins; in A Man Called Otto, the titular Otto is a merely a grumpy old man living in an ordinary gated community, who gets redeemed by the ordinary love of his neighbors; in Larry Crowne, the titular Crowne starts out his journey of personal rejuvenation as a fired Walmart employee.

Not that all of these films rank equally in caliber, of course. Joe vs. the Volcano was bizarre and Larry Crowne was mostly forgettable. What unites them, though, is the way they explore the great acts of charity, generosity, courage and resilience that ordinary people are capable of, and the oftentimes epic scope of the drama that can unfold from the centre of ordinary lives.

Tom Hanks plays his fair share of over-the-top heroes and villains, too, but one of the clearest messages I take from the totality of his films is that even the most ordinary of lives contains the stuff of epic drama. None of his films spend much time explicitly connecting this idea to anything particularly spiritual, of course, but it does not take a Christian pastor like me much effort to do so.

According to Jesus, the Kingdom of God is like tiny mustard seed planted in the earth, or a bit of yeast kneaded into dough; it's like farmers planting seed or fathers welcoming home their prodigal sons (and make no mistake, all these images would have seemed commonplace and everyday to Jesus’s First Century audience). But if it is like these things, then whatever else it is, the Kingdom of God must be something that thrives—throbs, even—in the ordinary circumstances of everyday life.

If you wanted one more parable to help you imagine what that looks like, you might consider the story of a lawyer being called on to defend a victim of unlawful dismissal (Philadelphia), the bereaved husband journeying with his son through their shared grief (Sleepless in Seattle), the inventive father trying to raise his autistic son (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), or any of Tom Hanks’ other ordinary characters, who discover epic events unfolding in the midst of their everyday lives.

next post >>>