Here is an odd footnote to the very painful experience I had watching Tom Hanks's terrible new romcom Larry Crowne, which is sickly-sweet and phoney. I discovered an added element of pain, an extra-textual element. I realised that I like Tom Hanks, and I want his films to be at least OK, because I sort of believe that he is a nice guy. And he may well be. I have never met him, never interviewed him, never spoken about him to the people I know who have met him. I have absolutely no evidence that Hanks is a nice guy — whatever that may mean. What I have is a casual, unexamined faith in the nice-guy persona he has cultivated over the years in his movies. Yet he is an actor who specialises in variations of these personae, and journalists and critics are supposed to be hard-headed cynical meanies who don't take such things at face value.
When I contributed to the film podcast this week, I mentioned to Jason Solomons my feeling of distress on Hanks's behalf because he had made a bad film. He was baffled, not so much at my conviction that Hanks is "nice" as my assumption that everyone feels like this. He doesn't particularly agree – in fact, he thinks there is occasionally something weirdly village-idiot-ish about him. My faith in Tom Hanks's niceness – as distinct from his acting abilities, formidable though they are – is based, if I'm honest, on his devoutly Anglophile presence on British TV chat shows in which his charm is brilliantly deployed. Here he is on Graham Norton, and doing a great anecdote here about working with Ron Howard (at 12:38). And here, at 1:00, is his very funny demonstration of doing the voice work for Toy Story.
I realise that I find Hanks a more watchable presence being himself on chat shows than in his movies, in which he can be mannered and saccharine. On the small screen, promoting Larry Crowne, Hanks is relaxed, worldly, sophisticated and charming. But in the film itself, he is strained, unconvincing, infantile and silly. A cynic might say that the niceness he projects on these television shows is not necessarily any more authentic than when he is appearing in an avowedly fictional movie. But it is powerfully more entertaining and attractive. So I am going to persist in believing that the real Tom Hanks is nice – and he should somehow release a montage of his chat-show promotional duties plugging Larry Crowne, rather than the film itself.
