Roger Ebert, David Edelstein, Sarah Kerr, and Elvis Mitchell
Dear Sarah,
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StumbleUponWhen I read a sentence about Tom Hanks like "Wherever he goes, a treacly, white-guy triumphalism seems to follow," I wonder what impulse causes you to add the words "white guy" to the sentence. That's the one part he can't help. Would you write this sentence substituting "Jewish" or "black" or "Native American"? Tom Hanks embodies all he embodies. You don't like it, find another actor. To some degree every actor simply is what he is. Does Denzel Washington ever put you in mind of treacly black-guy triumphalism? In The Bone Collector, for example? Or are both Hanks and Washington in scripts you don't like because as scripts they embody treacly triumphalism?
But of course America loves Tom Hanks. Quite often I do, too. I think it is important that as film critics we stay in touch with ordinary audiences--not to reflect their values, because we must have our own, but to understand them. Most of the ideological criticisms of The Green Mile are by and for sophisticated and subtle observers, writing for one another. The average moviegoer with $8 and a seat in an Abilene multiplex is likely to find himself or herself subtly more complex, humane, and liberal after seeing that film than before. It is reductive and stereotyped to a media cineaste, but perhaps the best and most evolved movie that many of its viewers will see all year.
I agree with you, by the way, in feeling fed up to here with movies about men being on the ropes. The most offensive example of that trend, of course, was Fight Club, which I notice is very absent from most of the year-end best-film lists. Having recently returned from Calcutta, where the extent of the poverty was almost inconceivable to me, I now have even less sympathy for pathetic preppies who have to beat up each other to feel authentic. I am thinking now of an e-mail from a twentysomething whiner who said that his generation needed Fight Club because they have been denied a war like Vietnam to test themselves in.
Best,
Roger
David Edelstein is Slate's movie critic. Sarah Kerr is a regular contributor to Slateand the New York Review of Books. Elvis Mitchell currently reviews films for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, but will soon be doing so for the New York Times. Roger Ebert is the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Timesand co-host of the television program Roger Ebert & the Movies. 
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