The Movie Club

Hankering for the Old Hanks

As I’m sure someone has reminded you, Sarah, Samantha Morton in Sweet and Lowdown isn’t a “deaf-mute” but a mere mute: How else could she worship the protagonist’s artistry? Better than a mute, I might add: She is a mute who does laundry. It’s the talent for laundry that puts her closest to Woody Allen’s heart, I bet.

Yes, we can all agree, Roger demonstrates unparalleled “consideration for readers” and “habitual fairness.” Roger, you have evolved into the conscience of the American cinema. But I ask you: Isn’t that role sometimes paralyzing? You treat The Green Mile as if it’s a humanist milestone on the order of To Kill a Mockingbird. But it has been more than a third of a century since Mockingbird’s Great White Father and that shambling, saintly black martyr who pays for the sex crimes of white men–and in-between came the civil-rights movement. Isn’t it time to retire this archetype? Isn’t it so violently at odds with reality that it threatens to do more harm than good? (How disillusioning that some African-Americans have rough edges.) And while I’m at it: Why’d you like that damn Jar Jar picture???

I’m sympathetic to your complaints about critics who loudly swap opinions at screenings, but I think it’s more an issue for you (and Elvis, now) than for me. I could broadcast my views over the PA system and no one would much care, whereas word of your likes or dislikes would promptly make its way through the ranks to studio presidents, CEOs, and world leaders. (I refrain from saying what I think after most movies not because I want to tantalize people but because I reserve the right to change my mind in the course of writing a review.) Anyway, I’m always happy to eavesdrop on what people are saying in screening rooms or theaters–I often use that stuff in my columns, the tackier the better.

Sarah: I hate to say it, but the “guyness” in this year’s movies might be the corollary to all those young, hot-dogging male directors whom we’ve been celebrating. But there have still been a ton of great female performances. John Sayles, the last proud liberal-feminist, wrote a beautiful part for Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in Limbo that she turned into one of the comebacks of the decade. Like Janet McTeer in Tumbleweeds, she plays a woman who’s a, well, tumbleweed who gravitates to men she shouldn’t gravitate to and takes her long-suffering daughter along for the fall. I suppose you’d say these are soft roles, victims’ roles, but both actresses give these women complex consciousnesses–they fall and watch themselves falling, and they subtly comment on their trajectories.

A very, very strange performance is Sigourney Weaver’s in A Map of the World. As in The Good Mother, the issue is a woman’s self-destructive impulses in a society that has fixed expectations of how mothers and caregivers should behave. She can’t forgive herself for a tragic accident on her property, and in ways that I’m still trying to sort out, she helps to bring about her own–and her family’s–near ruin. Weaver plays this woman from the outset as unhinged, and the first-time director, Scott Elliot, doesn’t modulate her craziness enough. But by the end, the performance makes sense: It’s as if she’s scything her way home through a thicket of her own unmanageable emotions–and she gets there.

As for Hanks, let me say that I think he’s still a wonderful actor but am sorry that such a heavy spirit has descended upon him. He was once the breeziest of goofballs–but with a greater emotional range than almost any other goofball. A few weeks back I was reminiscing about the old Hanks with Pauline Kael. (Yes, I admit it–I’ve talked to her. I’m a fellow traveler.) We both confessed a fondness for Turner and Hooch. Then I said, “It’s too bad they had to kill Hooch, though. I mean, what big-funny-dog movie ends with the dog getting blown away?”

“Be thankful,” said Pauline. “If Hanks made it today there would be a memorial service.”

See you tomorrow.