The most underappreciated movie of Tom Hanks’ career: “That was an incredibly important movie for me”
Over the past three decades, Tom Hanks has climbed to Hollywood’s apex as one of America’s most beloved actors and a staple presence in high-grossing productions. There are few faces which have graced our screens more often than Hanks, and perhaps his greatest achievement is that he has become a near-universal presence without ever truly pushing audiences past breaking point. He remains, somehow, in the rose-tinted gaze of our collective mind’s eye.
His big break came with 1988’s Big, a fantasy comedy directed by Penny Marshall, but it wasn’t until the early 1990s that he had top-flight directors clambering after him. An appearance in Philadelphia opposite Denzel Washington in 1993 and the following year, Forrest Gump saw the Californian actor win his only two Academy Awards to date, both for ‘Best Actor’. This career peak saw Hanks become only the second actor, behind Spencer Tracy, to have won two consecutive ‘Best Actor’ Oscars.
It was a monumental moment that had the chance to crush the actor under the sheer weight of the gravitas attached. However, he survived and strove for more. After this early peak, Hanks maintained near-constant accolades over the years, appearing in a wealth of successful films from the Toy Story franchise to The Green Mile, Saving Private Ryan and Captain Phillips thereafter. Hanks’ filmography is nothing short of staggering.
When singling out the greatest Hanks movies, fans often gravitate to the accolade-showered blockbusters like Philadelphia, Forrest Gump or Saving Private Ryan. And why wouldn’t;t you? Those are admirable movies flecked with the humanity and compassion that Hanks’ performances are known for. However, when choosing his personal favourites, Hanks likes to look a little deeper into his archives.
During a 2021 appearance on The Bill Simmons Podcast, Hanks picked out A League of Their Own, Cast Away and Cloud Atlas as more obscure personal favourites, but earlier in 2023, he picked out a fourth he felt deserved more attention. “For one reason or another, no one references Road to Perdition,” Hanks told CinemaBlend’s ‘ReelBlend Podcast’ in January 2023. “And that was an incredibly important movie for me to go through.”
Hanks starred in the Sam Mendes direction as an early 1930s mob enforcer and family man, Michael Sullivan. The gripping crime drama was critically favoured and took $183.4m from an $80m budget. However, the movie was expected to create more of a ripple on the global pond with such a well-executed tale featuring Hanks alongside Paul Newman, Daniel Craig and Jude Law.
“You have me – ‘Don Moustache’ with a hat on – in it,” Hanks joked in reference to his facial hair in the movie. “But you also have two guys who turned out to be two of the biggest motion picture presences in the history of the industry with Jude Law and [Daniel] Craig. And [Sullivan] killed both of [their characters]!”
Hanks continued to explain why the movie was so important to him: “The logic of everything he does and how he says it and how he experiences things and sees them for the first time, that’s high country as far as I’m concerned. It doesn’t matter if it’s been viewed upon as being a quote-on-quote ‘success,’ it’s in the zeitgeist, and that’s the only thing that matters.”
“If somebody else chooses the movies, it would just be the hits, you know, the ones that play every Christmas,” Hanks continued to explain, noting that popularity can often cause a runaway train of hype that means it becomes hallowed ahead of some quieter releases. “There’s a number of things that I would say that I got to go back to and delve deep in the realm of what I thought was presence and authenticity that was very, very particular to those specific characters in those specific movies…I would say Road to Perdition would be one of those where I would just have to say, ‘Please look at the quiet here.'”
It’s touching to hear just how precious making movies is to an actor. For a performer who has been so ingrained in the industry for decades, it could be easy to lose sight of why you are there at all. But, Hanks is not one of these kinds of actors. He truly loves his work, even the movies that are a little overlooked and underappreciated.
