There is a particular quality that Tom Hanks has that very few actors possess: ordinariness. Not in a dismissive sense, but in the sense that you believe him completely as a regular person. He does not carry the weight of stardom on screen the way Brando did, or the magnetic otherness that Pacino or De Niro project. He looks like someone you might know. And that quality — that fundamental believability — is what has made him one of the most consistently successful and respected actors in the history of American cinema.
The early career was defined by comedy. Big, released in 1988, remains one of the most purely enjoyable films of the decade, and Hanks's performance as a twelve-year-old boy trapped in an adult body is a technical marvel — he never forgets the child inside the man, even in the film's more adult moments. But it was Philadelphia in 1993 that revealed the full depth of what he could do. Playing a lawyer dying of AIDS in an era when the subject was still deeply uncomfortable, Hanks won his first Oscar with a performance of extraordinary dignity and restraint.
Forrest Gump the following year won him a second consecutive Oscar — something only Spencer Tracy had achieved before. The film is sentimental and the sentimentality is not to every taste. But the performance is beyond criticism. Hanks makes Forrest's literal-mindedness feel like wisdom rather than stupidity, and the film's emotional moments land entirely because he earns them honestly.
Cast Away, in 2000, contains perhaps his finest work. He spent roughly ninety minutes of screen time alone on an island with no dialogue partner except a volleyball. The physical transformation was extraordinary — he famously lost fifty pounds and grew a genuine beard over a year between filming the opening and island sections. But the physical commitment would mean nothing without the emotional truth underneath it, and Hanks delivers that with complete conviction.
The later career has been equally rich. Captain Phillips, Bridge of Spies, A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood — each film a different kind of performance, each one marked by the same quality of absolute believability. He is now in his late sixties and still working at the highest level. Few careers in Hollywood have been so consistently excellent across so many decades and so many different kinds of films.
