“Check that film out”: the movie Tom Hanks won’t be angry, just disappointed you haven’t seen
Is there a sentence more crushing than, “I’m not angry; just disappointed?” Even if you don’t think so, you’d surely change your mind if those words, or an approximation of them, came directly from Tom Hanks.
As one of the nicest men in Hollywood, and ‘America’s Dad’, nobody would willingly disappoint the two-time Academy Award-winning legend. And yet, if you haven’t seen the one movie from his back catalogue that he really thinks you should, then be prepared for an appropriately gentle scolding.
Hanks’ nice-guy image has been so intrinsic to his persona for so long that he doesn’t even bother trying to play against type as a villain, because he knows the audience won’t buy it. Remember The Circle? Of course you don’t, which handily proves the point that he’s a rubbish antagonist, especially in a crap film.
The veteran’s laundry list of classic pictures dates back to the 1980s, and while he’d no doubt prefer if absolute dreck like Robert Zemeckis’ live-action Pinocchio and Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of the Vanities were swept under the rug, never to be seen by anybody ever again, he absolutely will not tolerate any Cloud Atlas slander in his, or any other, house.
Is the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer’s maddeningly ambitious sci-fi epic one of Hanks’ greatest-ever moments in front of the camera? Objectively, no, but a lot of people love it. It’s overlong, unwieldy, and unintentionally hilarious at its worst, but at its best, Cloud Atlas is an eye-popping and dazzling spectacle.
Following the tried-and-trusted route of underperforming at the box office before slowly inching its way toward cult classic status, the film has many fans, but Hanks has always been its single biggest and most vocal cheerleader. He adores everything about the movie and considers it one of his best, and it clearly gets under his skin when he talks to people who haven’t seen it.
A case in point, during one interview, when it was revealed that the person he was talking to hadn’t seen Cloud Atlas, Hanks gently but firmly insisted that they “really should.” In Hanks-speak, that’s basically the equivalent of anyone else saying, “What the fuck do you mean you haven’t seen Cloud Atlas?!?”
“Check that film out,” he insisted. “It’s an amazing film.” To paraphrase the Dude: that’s just, like, his opinion, man, and nobody is obligated to agree with him when there are plenty of viewers who thought it was self-indulgent shite, but he’s spoken so glowingly of Cloud Atlas for so long that you get the sneaking suspicion it’s the one entry in his filmography that he desperately wants everyone to see.
Have you seen Cloud Atlas? It doesn’t matter if you have or not, but should you ever come face-to-face with Tom Hanks, perhaps it’s best to tell him that you have anyway, because nobody wants to disappoint an icon.
