Off Screen - MR NICE BOY

EVERYBODY LIKES Tom Hanks. Don’t they? Well, he seems to think so. “I’m Mr Welcome to my living room, here are my children, would you like to stay for dinner,” he remarks. “That’s really my persona.” and the thing is, before you barf, before you get a chance to throw up all over his expensive suit and shiny shoes, you find yourself accepting his offer.

Hey, Tom is one hell of a likeable guy. He goofs around, he jokes, he smiles, he’s friendly and familiar, he’s liberal and intelligent, he’s serious about serious issues and flippant about flippant ones, he’s taller in the flesh than on the screen and better looking too. Pretty hard to fault really.

“I’m very comfortable with my image,” he declares, comfortably. “It’s a very comfortable living!” And then, lest you start thinking him arrogant, he adds, “That’s a joke, by the way. Once you’re elevated to the curious status of movie star/celebrity, which is a bizarre mix and I don’t know what the formula is but I think it’s A delta over EC times million dollar box office, you are who you are, and I think all the great motion picture celebrities are who they are, and you either accept them in the confines of the role or not.”

And even if we don’t accept them in the confines of the role, that doesn’t mean we stop liking them. Tom himself remarks, “I’ve made a few good movies and more than my share of stinkers.” In fact, he made the stinker to end all stinkers, utterly miscast in Bonfire of the Vanities, one of the most reviled and degraded big budget flops of movie history. But it doesn’t seem to have harmed his career.

In fact, in The Devil’s Candy, the fly on the wall book that chronicled the making of the epic disaster, Hanks is one of the few principals to emerge with honour intact. While Bruce Willis was lampooned for his entourage (which included a man dedicated to covering his bald spot) and Melanie Griffith mocked as an insecure, professional dumb blonde, acerbic author Julie Salamon lavished the amiable Hanks with praise, describing him as ‘diligent and uncomplaining – and he had talent . . . Hanks always went out of his way to distinguish himself from other movie stars. He believed, and he wanted everyone else to believe, that he was just a guy doing a job.’ And, as the following excerpt demonstrates, she picked up on a sly vein of humour that certain others missed:

‘In between takes, Willis and Hanks sat on their canvas chairs and watched themselves on playback, on the video monitor. Hanks looked bored as Willis droned on about how his work on ‘Moonlighting’ improved his ability to play to the camera. Suddenly Hanks leaned forward until his face was just inches from the video monitor.

‘He examined the close-up on Willis, whose image was wearing the wise-guy smirk that had become a subject of much mocking commentary among the ‘Bonfire’ cast and crew over the past few weeks. “Big, shit-eating grin I see there on the monitor,” said Hanks jovially. Willis showed no sign of registering the comment. Hanks peered at the monitor again. “Yup,” he said, “there it is.”

‘Just then the Willis entourage converged around their boss. Hanks kept staring at the monitor.’

“You know, I think that’s a pretty accurate book,” says Hanks now. “Of course, I read the book from the back to the front ’cause I checked my name in the index. ‘Man, I’m all over this thing, I better read it’. That book describes how hard it is to make any movie, not just how hard it is to make one of the worst movies of all time. The same exact sort of book could have been written about Gone With The Wind.

“I liked the book. I called up Brian De Palma and I said Brian, I made this movie with you, and I know more about you now after reading this book than I did after spending four months with you. What’s odd now is that more people have read the book than saw the movie.”

So who better to play a homosexual lawyer dying of a

sexually transmitted disease in Philadelphia, the first big budget mainstream Hollywood AIDS movie than the man who survived the Bonfire, Mr Tom Hanks? Even if he does say so himself.

“Let’s talk about it from this purely from a crass, business point of view,” says Hanks. “AIDS/homosexual, who’s gonna play it? Do they want somebody who is hideous and unlikeable or that people already fear and loathe or are they gonna get me? Mr Amiable? Mr Nice Boy? I thought that was the perfect avenue for me to be very familiar to the audience, very non-threatening but at the same time brand new turf for myself and the audience.

“This movie is a mainstream business venture that cost $25 million and is governed by all the contrivances that govern any other movie of the same ilk. The fact that I’m a heterosexual actor playing the gay man in the movie is patently . . . what? Unfair, unright, unjust? But it’s the reality because you tell me a movie star that can open up a movie the way I’ve been able to, thank goodness, through whatever cache I’ve had, who is openly gay? Names? Anybody? . . . So what a surprise! It’s just the reality of what it is. What would be great is if we could look upon the fact in the year 2004, ten years after the fact, and say what the big deal was.”

Hanks insists he did not take the role just to do something different. “If I really wanted to do something totally different to Sleepless in Seattle I would have just played some sort of rampaging psycho killer who hacks and slashes his way through mid-town America. That would have been really, really different. What I always try to do anyway, what any actor will try to do, is forever expand the horizons that he is accepted in. I took the movie because as an actor who makes films, I like to work on storylines that are kind of anthropological, so to speak, and become records of how we are living at any given time.

“Artistically, I think that’s as close as I get, as this kind of movie star/celebrity/actor, to taking part in something that for good or for bad will be some sort of photo record of how we lived in 1994. You can go back through history and find the movies that do that. Sometimes they’re romantic comedies, sometimes they’re gritty war epics, and sometimes they’re sociological treatises. But they hold up forever because they’re not dealing with the cars we drove but with the mental process that everybody uses to survive day in and day out.”

Hanks, who has (jokingly) described himself as “a heterosexual poster boy” was not worried about the possibility of being stigmatised by the character. “It’s not 1954 anymore and even though there probably are a lot of gay actors out there who are not openly gay, still Rock Hudson is dead, of AIDS, and he doesn’t have to pretend to be married to his publicist’s secretary any longer. It’s just a different time. I think there’s an old school sensibility that still rationalises that there must be some sort of stigma from playing homosexuality. I think that era passed in the audience’s mind some time ago.”

Hanks (a married, family man) admits that he has never worried about AIDS, and has not lost anybody close to him. “My consciousness of this whole issue is probably like the vast majority of Americans, we”re aware that it’s a tragedy, we’re aware that people get it and die slowly, but we just haven’t seen it first hand. I had friends in high school who have since passed away, I had a cousin who died of AIDS and I had a number of associates who I knew kind of well who died of AIDS, but I do not have a kind of hands-on experience of seeing somebody literally waste away, day by day, over the course of years, in front of your eyes.

“That’s a great equalising experience for anybody and I think your idea of AIDS and people with AIDS and homosexuals with AIDS would never be the same if you’ve had that and I think in some ways we’re trying to make that a parenthetical experience for the movie audience.”

Preparing for the part was an eye opening experience for Hanks. “I thought I’d tried most things . . . but rimming! Where did that come from?” he jokes (referring to the practice of oral-anal sexual stimulation, familiar to anybody who has ever worked in an office). “This is what I found, in the course of doing the whole movie, in talking to the men that I talked to, in the nature of this very kind of polarised society in which we live where we’re slowly falling more and more into armed camps that are separated solely by point of view, I found that I had more in common with these men than I thought I did.

“That surprised me because I thought I was an enlightened white American. I thought I was hip and current and solid, commonsensical. I thought I knew how things were and I thought I gave everybody a fair shake. But there was still, just in the back, because of the access and relationships I’ve had with other people, that in fact without even trying stereotypes crept into my psyche and my consciousness. And in talking to the men and reading a number of great works by gay writers I was genuinely surprised and somewhat taken aback by the realisation that I had much more in common with them than I thought.

“That we all shared a confused adolescence, for example. This is big stuff, and I’m no philosopher, but the search for feeling comfortable in one’s own skin is an individual search. Regardless of one’s sexuality, this is what you’re looking for. The way they felt in those painful adolescent years of 13, and 16 and 19 and 21 were very much the way I felt when I was younger. Them stumbling around the landscape as young adults trying to figure out the metaphysical questions like ‘who am I?’ and ‘where can I belong?’ and ‘is there someone out there for me?’ were the same exact sort of worries and fears and stumblings as I experienced as an adolescent. The difference is only large if you look at the bigger ramifications of who we are as human beings but it’s the same exact sort of journey.”

The film received a mixed critical reception in America,

although it leaped to number one at the box office. “I think the studio was kind of naively afraid that the audience that would be most angered by what we did in the movie would be the kind of straight heterosexual middle American audience and this is the audience that ended up embracing it much more than the more politically active wing of the gay community,” observes Hanks. “The gay community have an awful lot to say about the movie, most of it very angry, most of it very negative but at the same time very valid criticism, which has in fact helped the movie enter into the public eye in a way, which is yet another bizarre aspect of the media.”

One criticism levelled at the film is that, although most movies will go to any lengths to get a bit of heterosexual bedroom activity in, the relationship between Hanks and his onscreen lover Antonio Banderas does not get any steamier than a peck on the cheek.

“That’s true,” Hanks admits candidly. “It’s not a gay love story. Right now it’s about 50/50, a lot of people are angry that we didn’t have it, a lot of people feel there was no need for it. If we had done it, I think they just would have switched. Some people would have said, ‘Oh look at the brave heterosexuals who are so bold as to kiss each other on screen, I guess we’re supposed to be impressed by this somehow’, and it would have placated one audience and shocked the other.

“I think by just not having it, but understanding that without question this man is gay, without question he’s been with his lover for nine years, without question he’s dying of AIDS, I think it becomes a phantom issue. Although if you’re going to kiss somebody in the shower, I’d like it to be Antonio Banderas.”

Hanks remains sceptical about what the film can really achieve. “Can anybody name a movie that actually changed anybody’s opinion about anything? I think that because it’s an entertainment that costs $7 to get in, because we’re all these movie star people who appear on TV chat shows, and because they know that it cost $25 million, is in top ten box office blah blah blah, I don’t know how much a motor for social change the movie can be.

“I don’t know how it can honestly change anybody’s mind short of getting them to think about maybe, for the first time in a long time, the particulars of how they feel about someone who has AIDS, or how they feel about someone who is a homosexual. Maybe what it can give in a vicarious manner is the experience of losing somebody to AIDS, now that will get you thinking about it but at the same time, till you experience that in a much more realistic physical manner it will always remain some sort of abstraction.”

Neither is the star (criticised by some sections of the American press for failing to wear a red AIDS ribbon at an awards ceremony) inclined to lend his name to any political cause. “I didn’t take the film for political reasons. I am personally very sceptical of anybody who trades in on their Hollywood celebrity for some sort of political gain. I think it’s a very heady kind of place to be in, to stand in front of a podium and rail about some sort of injustice just because you’ve been invited to. Some people do it very often and they do it very well and I respect them, but for me to suddenly leap into the political fray would just not be true. I have difficulty buying it.

“When it comes down to personally endorsing some sort of political view you’re not gonna change anybody’s mind, you’re just gonna be preaching to the choir; they’re already converted, they already agree with you. There is however things you can do from a purely fund-raising point of view, and I”m certainly open to that, because that actually puts money in people’s pockets for care and research for AIDS, and there’s plenty of other organisations that I give to and help out now and again. But when it comes to that aspect of politics my mind tunes out anytime the movie star starts speaking. It’s one thing being Dr Jonas Salk (who helped eradicate polio) but it’s something else to be the guy who played him in a movie.”

Neither is Hanks quite ready to give up his repertoire of gay jokes. “I would say I’m the classic Jeffersonian democrat. Jefferson put forward this kind of thing in which there’s a degree of agrarian anarchy going on, which essentially means you cut everybody all the slack they need, the pursuit of happiness is your own damn business and nobody else’s. I would preach that at a dinner party and still go home and make jokes about faggots. I would, without question. That’s kind of built-in to the enlightened liberal psychology of railing against PC correctness.

“I believe, that if you’re a homosexual and you’re with a bunch of friends you should be able to make a joke about heterosexuals without being penalised for it. I assume that they do. In fact some of my best friends, who are homosexuals, have told me funny jokes about breeders. They’re fine. I’m not threatened by anybody’s sense of humour, I’m not threatened by bona fide examples of wit. Provided they’re witty and not cruel. My own point of view as far as what makes me laugh has never been bent towards the cruel side of humour anyway.

“But if it’s a bona fide witty joke, that is poking fun at them as human beings as opposed to homosexuals, I’ve got no problems with anybody’s joke as far as that goes. I am in fact a pretty funny guy, and that’s alright. But it’s so easy for everything to tip off into some other realm that just becomes cruel, that doesn’t make me laugh no matter what the subject matter is. But to run away now and say, ‘Sorry, no jokes about homosexuals, no jokes about heterosexuals, no jokes about Jews’, then you get into a degree of political correctness that . . . smacks of communism, if you ask me!”

He laughs, to ensure you realise that he is joking. He is (even if he does say so himself) a pretty funny guy. And now, the funny guy who rose to stardom kissing a mermaid, is odds on favourite to win this year’s Best Actor Oscar. “Oh, it’s so embarrassing,” he declares. “I’m sweating bullets. I’ll go to the Oscars if they just ask me to park, I’ll go to fill seats, I’ll go to wrangle cable out the back, I’ll go to play the back of the llama during the Doctor Dolittle musical piece.

“I’ll do anything to be on the Oscars ’cause it’s a great night. Should I win, I just hope I don’t say or do something so stupid that it haunts me for the rest of my career.”