{"id":187562,"date":"2023-01-15T21:52:59","date_gmt":"2023-01-15T21:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/tom-hanks-knows-exactly-what-hes-doing-rolling-stone\/"},"modified":"2023-01-15T21:52:59","modified_gmt":"2023-01-15T21:52:59","slug":"tom-hanks-knows-exactly-what-hes-doing-rolling-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/tom-hanks-knows-exactly-what-hes-doing-rolling-stone\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Hanks Knows Exactly What He’s Doing \u2013 Rolling Stone"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\n

\tOf A Man Called Otto<\/em>, Tom Hanks stars as a grunty older man named Otto, who’s sort of a dick. He’s a little bit of a busybody. He lives on a quiet street in suburban Pittsburgh where everybody seems to know each other and where you need a parking permit in your window to park your car, otherwise somebody (Otto) will notice. The older residents, Otto among them, have a bit of history. This does not prevent Otto from believing that everybody in his midst is something of an idiot. He is right; everyone else is wrong. The whippersnappers with their phones and their social media. The young store employees whose insistence on helping this older man find what he needs makes Otto feel that his intelligence is being insulted. The people who put garbage in a recycling bin \u2014 which Otto, a sticks for rules whose daily routine consists of making his rounds and correcting his neighbors’ mistakes, makes a point of dutifully retrieving and discarding in the proper place. Nothing seems to make him happy. A retirement party only reminds him that he felt shitty about the job to begin with. And he has no one \u2014 his personality makes this unsurprising, but still. Watching, you immediately jump from wondering where his family is to thinking that a lack of family may explain why he is the way that he is.<\/p>\n

\n\tA Man Called Otto<\/em> is kind of funny as a Tom Hanks experiment. It clarifies something about his persona. This is the man who played Mister Rogers, who once worked to rescue Matt Damon from WWII with his dignity intact amid stunning violence. He’s Mr. Reliable. Apollo 13<\/em>, Captain Phillips<\/em> and Sully<\/em> all coast on his sturdy moral backbone, a correctness that is undimmed by a short temper or the occasional stern look. Hanks is one of those actors who uses his sternness discerningly enough that you feel you must have earned it. When he’s gotten weird, it’s felt like a joke: weirdness doesn’t come naturally to him. So he occasionally plays around with the unnatural. Grotesqueness, like the kind we saw earlier this year in Elvis<\/em>, where Hanks played the King’s sleazy, bloated, carnivalesque manager, is a characteristic that, in Hanks’s hands, only works (or tries) because we know the actor is the radical opposite. We know it’s false, but he’s a movie star, one of the finest, and one of the last. When a movie star of this caliber hits a false note, we’re almost criminally willing to pretend it was on purpose. The compelling thing about Hank’s slithering, greasy turn in Elvis<\/em>which Hanks clearly relishes, is that it’d be hard to prove us wrong.<\/p>\n

\n

\n

\t\tEditor’s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n
\n