Over-the-top villainy has never come easily to Tom Hanks. But in his best recent roles, he's deftly revealed the complexities of heroism.
Austin Butler poured everything he had into playing Elvis. The actor shares the grief, music and obsessive research that went into his portrayal.If the tragedy of Elvis the man is that he never breaks free of Parker, the tragedy of “Elvis” the movie is that it never does either. Even as it villainizes Parker , Luhrmann’s film proves curiously indulgent of him and of Hanks’ overweening performance.
In other words, I come to praise Tom Hanks, not bury him. I’m even notionally sympathetic to the idea that his “Elvis” performance works in context, that it makes you recoil to exactly the degree that it should. Of course he comes across as a malignant parasitic growth, because that’s exactly what Parker was.
Playing the bad guy has never come naturally to Hanks, though it could be rewarding to see him try, whether he was embodying the noblest of a bad lot in the 2002 gangster melodramaor delivering unctuous comic villainy in the Coen brothers’ “The Ladykillers” . In the context of a career often overshadowed by flattering if reductive comparisons to Jimmy Stewart, a wild swing like Col. Parker, love him or hate him, makes a kind of sense.
And there is precedent in Hanks’ career for both Parker’s over-the-top wickedness and Luhrmann’s prosthetic-laden artifice. In a way, this Parker might make more sense popping up in, in which Hanks played six different characters, differentiated by wigs, noses, accents, languages, vocal inflections and other gaudy externals.
So, for that matter, are a lot of memorable Hanks characters from the last decade, even if most of them earn your admiration rather than your disgust. I’m thinking especially of Capt. Richard Phillips in
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