A Humanist Portrait of the Heart: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (Part III)

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You don’t especially notice it when you’re just watching the odd film here and there, but when you try to watch the entire Tom Hanks filmography from beginning to end, like my wife and I did last year, you might notice, after a while, how distinctly godless his whole body of work actually is. This would stand out all the more markedly if, like me, you then wanted to write a blog series looking at his films from a theological perspective. Unlike the movies of Charleston Heston, for example, that were so often so explicitly religious (The Greatest Story Ever Told, The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur), or the movies of Jim Carey, let’s say, that often deal indirectly with very deep theological themes (Bruce Almighty, The Truman Show), God rarely figures, either as a character or a consideration, in most Tom Hanks movies.

There are a few exceptions to this rule. Certainly Forrest Gump is replete with theological themes, and The Green Mile can quite easily be read is some sort of a Christian allegory. There were one or two religious moments in Joe vs. the Volcano, to be sure, though these are largely forgotten; and in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood Hanks plays a bona fide Presbyterian minister, though the religious element in his portrayal of Mr. Roger’s story is distinctly muted. And anyways, these few films with expressly religious themes are quite overshadowed by his involvement with the Da Vinci Code movies, a trilogy of (mostly awful) movies that paint the story of the church with such bright swatches of cynicism, skepticism, an free historical invention, that it often borders on blasphemy and more than once crosses over the border completely.

So Tom Hanks, as an actor, seems not all that interested in exploring religious themes. This may not raise many eyebrows; neither does Sylvester Stallone or Tom Cruise, but you don’t see me blogging about them. What makes Hanks’s lack of interest in God of particular note, I think, is the fact that, in addition to his agnosticism, he has also earned the endearing reputation as one of Hollywood’s most wholesome actors.

He's often called “America’s Dad,” owing to the fact that his consistent portrayal of “genuine, honest characters” has “etched him into the heart” of the average American. Many even refer to him as an “everyman” actor—perhaps not realizing the irony that the phrase “everyman” was originally a religious term, used to describe a literary character who allegorically represents all of humanity in its relationship with the Divine. But if Hanks really is an American “everyman,” its especially notable how little relationship his films have, on the whole, with “the divine.”

Instead, what we find in Tom Hanks’s films is a general celebration of human goodness, things like honest grit, integrity no matter the cost, determination no matter the odds, a courageous sense of humor, self-made luck. While many Americans profess to being spiritual without being religious, Tom Hanks is, it would seem, religious without being spiritual. That is to say: he presents us with all the classic religious virtues—prudence, courage, temperance, and so on—without any of the traditional spiritual trappings—prayer, devotion to a higher power, self-sacrifice in service of the divine—that used to be understood as a clear path to their attainment.

This is not so much a critique as it is an observation. Religion does not de facto make a man good; history is stuffed with examples to prove that this is the case. However, it is interesting that in Tom Hanks’s characters, we see a wide range of virtues on display, with very little interest in wondering where they come from. It is assumed, I suppose, that they are simply there, present in the human heart; and provided one is willing to tap in to them, it seems, they can be accessed just as readily as their counterparts—cowardice, despair, decadence, and so on.

Or perhaps not quite as readily, necessarily. There is a reason Tom Hanks’s characters are so compelling, because they point us to something that we all hope is true but need some convincing to believe—that despite the great evidence to the contrary, the human heart is, at its core, bent towards good and tending towards great feats of quiet virtue.

On this point, a Christian assessment of the situation would be both in hearty agreement and also in vehement disagreement. Inasmuch as we believe that all human beings are truly made in the Image of God, it should not surprise us an iota whenever we glimpse reminders of the profound goodness of the human heart. At the same time, because we believe in the doctrine of original sin—the one doctrine, as Chesterton famously said, for which we have ample evidence—a robust Christian assessment of the idea that the human heart is inherently virtuous would also want to offer some very significant caveats. Yes, there is profound goodness woven into the fibre of the human soul, but let’s not forget how that same soul is curved in on itself. Short of a divine intervention, the highest virtues—especially faith, and hope, and love—can only, at best, be parodied, but never fully realized.

Perhaps it is too much to expect too theological an analysis of virtue in the films of a highly popular, widely beloved Hollywood actor, but for my part, the thing that makes Tom Hanks so compelling to watch on screen is the same thing that makes him so frustrating: his apparently naïve belief in a humanist vision of our inherent goodness. While I share the vision, I think, I find myself regularly wanting to ask him what he thinks it takes to realize it.

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