Tom Hanks

A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: Mr. Rogers pries open a soul

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Matthew Rhys and Tom Hanks in A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

The Wife and I finally got around to streaming the pleasantly entertaining A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, with Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers. I had already seen the recent documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, which I’ll touch on a few paragraphs later.

In A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the investigative journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) is a notch-on-his-belt guy, who revels in bringing down the famous. When the subjects of his profiles read his articles about them, it’s the worst day of their lives. Despite his professional success, a smart and sexy wife (Susan Kelechi Watson) and a new baby, he’s profoundly unhappy. We learn that much of this stems from unresolved anger at his father (Chris Cooper).

To his disgust, Vogel is assigned to write a brief puff piece on that icon of niceness, Mr. Rogers. The movie is about Mr. Rogers trying to disarm Vogel’s cynicism by excavating Vogel’s daddy issues.

As written, Vogel’s emotional journey is a little too predictable for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood to be a great movie, but it’s emotionally satisfying.

Of course, Tom Hanks is a perfect Mr. Rogers. Rhys is okay.

If you want to appreciate a great actor’s work, watch the very first time we see Chris Cooper. He signals that he is intoxicated with a slightly unsteady step backwards, and goes on to a perfectly realistic drunk performance, without ever lapsing into a Foster Brooks broadness,

Susan Kelechi Watson is very winning as Vogel’s wife, not a particularly complex part, but her charisma makes me want to see more of her.

This is the best work so far from director Marielle Heller (Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?). She adds just the perfect dashes of magical realism (dropping Vogel into the sets and among the characters of the TV show), which is a difficult thing to get right.

We get to meet the real Fred Rogers in the recent biodoc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? What is so surprising is that Rogers’ sometimes laughably gentle affect sprang from such internal ferocity. It turns that Rogers was a man who hated, hated, hated the moral emptiness and materialism of commercial children’s television.

In theaters, Won’t You Be My Neighbor submerged audiences in their hankies. I did choke up three times during A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, but Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was pretty much one long ugly cry for me.

Streaming Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is included with subscriptions to HBO and DirecTV, and the stream can be purchased for $14.99 from all major streaming platforms. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is available to stream from all the usual outlets; I paid Amazon $2.99.

THE POST: riveting thriller and revelatory personal portrait

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Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in THE POST

The Post may be a docudrama, but it plays as a thriller and an astonishingly insightful portrait of Katharine Graham by Meryl Streep. It’s one of the best movies of the year – and one of the most important.

Essentially, this movie is about a corporate decision, but master storyteller Steven Spielberg sets it up as a tick-tock, high stakes thriller.  Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Streep) must decide whether to publish the Pentagon Papers at a moment when her company is most vulnerable to market forces and government intimidation.  Nothing less than the American principle of freedom of the press hangs in the balance.

The Post also delivers the personal and feminist transformation of Katharine Graham, learning to move beyond her Mad Men Era roles as wife/mother/socialite andto , for the first time, assume real, not titular, command of a business empire.  And she goes All In on the ballsiest gamble any CEO could make.  To say that Streep brings Graham to life is inadequate.  Streep IS Graham. It sometimes seems like Streep can get an Oscar nomination without even making a movie, but this performance is one of Streep’s very best.

Spielberg surrounds Streep with a dazzling cast.  Tom Hanks lowers the pitch of his voice and becomes the swashbuckling editor Ben Bradlee.  Tracy Letts gives us another fine performance, this time as Graham’s financial guru Fritz Beebe.  As Bradlee’s second wife Tony, Sarah Paulson ignites a monologue with her piercing eyes.

Bruce Greenwood is quite brilliant as Robert McNamara, Graham’s old friend and the architect (and unwilling sta) of the Pentagon Papers. Greenwood is such an overlooked actor, and he’s so reliably good (he was even good in Wild Orchid, for Chrissakes).

The Pentagon Papers was the 7,000-page secret official history of the American involvement in the Vietnam War. Commissioned by then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the Pentagon Papers chronicled the years of bad decisions by the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations and, especially, the deceitfulness of JFK’s and LBJ’s public optimism about the War.  The truth was that the US government knew that the war was unwinnable and that it was only prolonged because nobody knew how to get out while saving face.  The US President in 1971, Richard Nixon, was following the same course, unnecessarily wasting the lives of another 20,000 Americans during his term of office; the ruthless Nixon and his henchman Henry Kissinger were desperate to keep the Pentagon Papers secret.  A private sector defense expert, Daniel Ellsberg, had access to the Pentagon Papers and sought to have them published, and The Post tells this story, which takes the audience from a jungle firefight into the courtroom of the US Supreme Court.

Baby Boomers will appreciate being transported back to quaint 1971 technology: typewriters, one-page-at-a-time Xerox machines, rotary pay phones, real typeset and ink presses.  (And cigarette smoking in restaurants and cigars in the workplace.)

I’ve also written an essay on some of the historical figures and events depicted in The Post: historical musings on THE POST.

The Post is worth seeing for Streep’s performance, for the history (incredibly important at this moment in the nation’s history) and for the sheer entertainment value.  One of the year’s best.

 

BRIDGE OF SPIES: pretty good spy story with a great Mark Rylance

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Tom Hanks in BRIDGE OF SPIES
Tom Hanks in BRIDGE OF SPIES

In Steven Spielberg’s true-to-life espionage thriller Bridge of Spies, Tom Hanks plays James B. Donovan, the insurance lawyer who went on a Cold War secret mission to negotiate the trade of a captured Russian spy for the captured US spy plane pilot Francis Gay Powers.  That Russian spy was Rudolph Abel, played by Mark Rylance – himself perhaps the best reason to see this movie.

Rylance is a top echelon Shakespearean actor from the UK – best known in the US for his star turn as the dour Thomas Cromwell in the television miniseries Wolf Hall.  In a remarkably minimalist yet evocative performance, Rylance reveals a man who lives by a code and is doggedly loyal to his own misguided cause – with absolutely no expectations of fairness or mercy from anyone else.  The effect is to make us sympathize with a guy who is trying to give our most menacing enemy our dearest nuclear secrets.  As my friend Karyn noted about Rylance, “less is more”.

This is not a great movie.  Sure, Spielberg is the master of entertainment (complete with sentimentally swelling music at the end).  After the movie’s riveting opening sequence of spy craft, we settle into a sometimes ponderous segment showing the Abel trial and the U-2 missions.  Bridge of Spies takes off again when Hanks’ Donovan must head behind the Iron Curtain.

[SPOILER ALERT – After seeing the film, I was compelled to research James B. Donovan to see if he really represented Abel and negotiated both the Abel-for-Powers deal AND the release of over a thousand Cuban prisoners from the Bay of Pigs fiasco.  Indeed, he did – all of the acts depicted in the movie seem to be factual.  But the real James B. Donovan was not the Everyman portrayed by Spielberg and Hanks.  Before going into private practice, Donovan served a stint as the General Counsel of the OSS – the predecessor of the CIA.  While slipping off to East Berlin to barter for Powers, he was on the New York City Board of Education.  And, instead of returning to obscurity after bringing Powers back to the US, he ran for US Senate from New York.]

 

DVD/Stream of the Week: Captain Phillips

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Here’s my pick for 2013’s best Hollywood movie.  In Captain Phillips, Tom Hanks stars as the real-life ship captain hijacked by Somali pirates and rescued by American commandos in 2009. The real-life Phillips survived his terrifying ordeal with guts and smarts, and Hanks and director Paul Greengrass bring the story alive. Greengrass is an old hand at movies with urgency and tension: Bloody Sunday, two movies in the Bourne franchise and an Oscar nomination for United 93.

Another key is that Captain Phillips was shot on the high seas on an actual container ship, an actual lifeboat and a skiff just like the real pirates use. As a result, it’s amazingly real when the pirates clamber up the side of the massive ship while both vessels roll in the waves and when the seamen and pirates play hide-and-go-seek below decks in the dark.

That being said, the movie wouldn’t work without Tom Hanks, who is unsurpassed at playing an Everyman thrust into a perilous situation. Hanks is our generation’s Jimmy Stewart, and I can see Hanks playing Stewart’s roles in Rear Window, Vertigo, Anatomy of a Murder and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Most of the pirates are standard types, but the lead pirate is a much more textured character, superbly played by Barkad Abdi, hitherto a Somali-American limo driver from Minneapolis. The depth in Abdi’s performance is also essential to the film’s success. The cast also features character actor Michael Chernus, so good in Higher Ground and Men in Black 3, as the #2 on the ship.

All in all, Captain Phillips is a flawless true story thriller.  It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

Barkad Abdi

Saving Mr. Banks: Hanks as Disney, slathered with sentimentality

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SAVING MR. BANKS - TRAILER NO. 1 -- Pictured: Tom Hanks (Screengrab)

Saving Mr. Banks is Disney’s story of the making of Mary Poppins, centering on the conflict between the avuncular Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) and the harshly fastidious author of the source material, P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson).  It’s a pleasing and satisfying movie, albeit sentimental, predictable and emotionally manipulative.  (I saw this with The Wife, who found the movie to be deeper than I did.)

From top-to-bottom, Saving Mr. Banks is quite well-acted.  It’s great to see Hanks bring alive Walt Disney – such an icon, especially to the Baby Boomers who watched him introduce the most imaginative family entertainment every Sunday night on television. Colin Farrell is very good as the playful and loving but unreliable father. Kathy Baker and Paul Giamatti are good in particularly unchallenging roles.  Emma Thompson does just fine, too, although her role has been written to be somewhat one-dimensional.

Here’s a pet peeve of mine – the trailer gives away the heart of story (and the reason for the title).  If you’re interested in Walt Disney and/or Mary Poppins – and you have two hours – skip the trailer and see the movie.  Otherwise, just watch the trailer.

Captain Phillips: flawless true life thriller

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In Captain Phillips, Tom Hanks stars as the real-life ship captain hijacked by Somali pirates and rescued by American commandos in 2009.   The real-life Phillips survived his terrifying ordeal with guts and smarts, and Hanks and director Paul Greengrass bring the story alive.  Greengrass is an old hand at movies with urgency and tension: Bloody Sunday, two movies in the Bourne franchise and an Oscar nomination for United 93.

Another key is that Captain Phillips was shot on the high seas on an actual container ship, an actual lifeboat and a skiff just like the real pirates use.  As a result, it’s amazingly real when the pirates clamber up the side of the massive ship while both vessels roll in the waves and when the seamen and pirates play hide-and-go-seek below decks in the dark.

That being said, the movie wouldn’t work without Tom Hanks, who is unsurpassed at playing an Everyman thrust into a perilous situation.  Hanks is our generation’s Jimmy Stewart, and I can see Hanks playing Stewart’s roles in Rear Window, Vertigo, Anatomy of a Murder and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Most of the pirates are standard types, but the lead pirate is a much more textured character, superbly played by Barkad Abdi, hitherto a Somali-American limo driver from Minneapolis.  The depth in Abdi’s performance is also essential to the film’s success.  The cast also features character actor Michael Chernus, so good in Higher Ground and Men in Black 3, as the #2 on the ship.

All in all, Captain Phillips is a flawless true story thriller.

Barkad Abdi

Cloud Atlas: more may not be better, but more is fun

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The filmmakers of Cloud Atlas clearly believe that more is better.  They give us not one, not two – but six stories spanning six centuries. They give us lots of movie stars: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant and more.  The actors each play multiple roles, with Hanks, Berry, Weaving and Sturgess playing at least six each – sometimes playing characters of different genders and different races.  There are costume dramas on the high seas of the 1840s and in 1930s England, plus two sci-fi settings – one recalling the high-tech, high-speed Tron and also a post-apocalyptic tribal future.   There are even two references to the sci-fi cult classic Soylent Green.  Cloud Atlas even had three directors.

Whew.

The six story lines are threaded together so we follow them until all six climax in the final hectic thirty minutes.  The six stories are each a series of cliff hangers.  As a character in one story falls into peril, the screenplay jumps to another thread, and on and on.

As it manically jumps from story to story, Cloud Atlas touches upon some Big Themes (good and evil, kindness and control, freedom, reincarnation), and we get the brush strokes of a New Agey theology (as if the world needs another theology).  This is where Cloud Atlas gets fuzzy.   Fortunately, the movie is so rapidly paced, that it never gets pretentious as we jump from story to story.

Is Cloud Atlas fun to watch?  Yes, there’s just too much fast-paced action going on, too much eye candy and too many engaging actors for Cloud Atlas to fail the fun test.  Is Cloud Atlas a great movie?  No, there just isn’t enough coherent substance in there to hook us emotionally.  Is it a Must See?  No.  Would I see it again?  No, but I’m glad I saw it once.