Hanks at war, in ‘Greyhound’ and vs. COVID
NEW YORK – Since contracting COVID-19 in March, Tom Hanks has been, by most measures, busy.
He and his wife, Rita Wilson, flew home after recuperating in Australia, where he had been shooting Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Presley film. He hosted the first from-home episode of “Saturday Night Live,” an already distant enough memory that it takes a beat for him to remember it. And he saw his new World War II naval drama “Greyhound” steered from theatrical release by Sony Pictures to Apple TV+ — the streaming service’s biggest movie yet.
But, mostly, Hanks has been taking it day by day.
“There’s sort of an ongoing physiological maintenance for your brain and for your body that we’ve been following through,” Hanks said, speaking by video conference from his home in California. “What can you do but try to bind up the hay in neat little bundles? That’s what we’ve been doing. Just going into the barn with the baling machine, saying, ‘Well, we got all this hay. Let’s at least stack it up and get it ready for the next day.’ ”
For many, Hanks’ contraction of COVID-19 was the first loud alarm bell that went off in the early days of the pandemic. If “America’s Dad” could get it, anyone could.
The decision to go public with their diagnoses, Hanks said in a recent interview, was twofold. He didn’t want any rumors about why the production was shut down. And if he was going to serve as an overdue public service announcement, so be it.
“Why hide from the facts?” he said. “These were the facts.”
The ordeal, one experienced with varying severity and symptoms between Hanks and Wilson, gave him a perspective on differing national responses to the coronavirus. The comparison with Australia, Hanks granted, isn’t a favorable one for the United States. But he said, there’s no need for “another dump tru ck to unload all the things that have gone wrong” in the U.S.
“Here we are. And let’s just all do our part, eh?” said Hanks. “Can we not all just wear a mask and social distance and wash our hands? It sounds pretty simple to me, and if you have a problem with that, I certainly wouldn’t trust you with a driver’s license. Chances are you’ll drive as fast as you want to, never use your turn signal and aim for pedestrians.”
Before the pandemic, “Greyhound” was going to hit theaters in early June, smack in between “Wonder Woman 1984” and “Top Gun 2.”
“We were going to fight like the scrappy runt of a litter in order to get somebody to pay attention to us,” said Hanks, chuckling.
Now, “Greyhound” will head straight into homes as a marquee event with little competition of similar scale or star power. A Tom Hanks-led, special effects-laden World War II movie is a weight class above most straight-tostreaming options in this strange summer movie season.
Disney+ has “Hamilton”; Apple TV+ has Hanks.
The film, made for about $40 million and acquired by Apple for a reported $70 million, is a taut 88-minute naval drama about a lesser-seen theater of the war, the Battle of the Atlantic. Hanks’ character is a humble captain for the
first time shepherding a convoy of boats across the Atlantic, guarding them from attacking German U-boats while traversing the “black pit” — the middle ocean territory bereft of air support. All heavy waves, faint sonar blips and evasive maneuvers, the film takes on almost mythical qualities.
“When everything went kablooey, we began to imagine: ‘Well, we have this movie about the stasis of characters in the middle of something of which they have no idea how long it’s going to last,’ ” said Hanks. “We didn’t expect a worldwide pandemic to mirror the theme and the action of the movie.”
“This is just about yesterday, today and tomorrow,” Hanks said. “Those three days are pretty much all humanity has.”
“Greyhound” has long been a pet project for the 63-year-old actor. He wrote the script, adapted from C. S. Forester’s 1955 novel “The Good Shepherd,” a book first given to him by his late friend and “Sleepless in Seattle” director Nora Ephron.
“It just stuck with him,” said Gary Goetzman, Hanks’ producing partner and co-founder of their company, Playtone. “As happens with him, he’ll ruminate about a certain idea, it goes in his blender, and one day he just put a script on my desk and very much wanted to make it.”
Hanks had approached others to write it and met with other filmmakers. But they tended to envision a grander version of the film.
“I said, ‘I love you so much but that’s not the point of what we’re trying to do,’ ” Hanks said. “We’re trying to condense this. We’re trying to get as much coffee in the can.”
Instead, he found a director in Aaron Schneider, a veteran cinematographer who last directed 2010’s “Get Low,” with Robert Duvall.
“Tom always called it ‘the perfect little 90-minute movie,’ ” Schneider said. “From the beginning, his point of entry was about maintaining this almost hyper-subjective point of view in terms of this captain’s experience. You would throw the audience into his world, sticking to over his shoulder.”
Hanks has been in similar worlds before. He’s been a captain four times previously: “Saving Private Ryan,” “Apollo 13,” “Sully” and “Captain Phillips.” A voracious reader of history, he’s returned frequently to WWII. With Steven Spielberg, Hanks is developing for Apple a third miniseries, following “The Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.”
For Hanks, whose father served in the Navy, his attachment to the era goes deeper than DNA. It’s about connecting to the wartime mentality of survival and sacrifice.
“I’m asked by every journalist, ‘Why do you keep going back to World War II?’ ” said Hanks. “The answer is because I come back to that position of the stress upon a human being’s psyche. It doesn’t have to be a captain, necessarily, on board a destroyer in the middle of the North Atlantic. It can be on an 8year-old kid or a 24-yearold woman or even a 54year-old man back in the United States wondering, ‘Are we going to live or die? Are we going to be free or not? How long is it going to go on?’ To me, that’s the human condition in every circumstance, even in today in 2020.”
“Relic”:
“The Swing of Things”:
New movies on demand this week
“First Cow”: Here's another movie that couldn't catch a break. Director Kelly Reichardt, beloved by critics and audiences who have seen tender, intimate, extraordinarily human movies (“Old Joy,” “Wendy and Lisa”), got some of the best reviews of her stellar career for this unlikely sort-of Western, which began its release minutes before the coronavirus pandemic shut down theaters everywhere (it had been due to come to Milwaukee in late March). The story centers on a frontier chef and a Chinese immigrant who form an unlikely partnership in the Pacific Northwest, with their success hinging on access to the first milking cow in the territory. After holding out hope for theatrical release, the studio opted to put it out digitally and on demand, starting Friday.
In this English comedy-drama, Bill Nighy is a father who has spent years searching for his missing son, who disappeared after a fight over a game of Scrabble. When he stumbles on an online player who he thinks is his long-lost son, he takes along his other son, long estranged because of his dad's obsessive search, to find the answer. Available digitally and on demand starting Friday.
When her elderly and dementia-afflicted mother returns home after seemingly disappearing, a woman (Emily Mortimer) begins to think the older woman's house might be part of the trouble in this new thriller. Available digitally and on demand starting Friday.
A naive couple's destination wedding is rerouted to Jamaica, where temptations, and a different point of view, await. Luke Wilson, Olivia Culpo, Adelaide Kane, Jon Lovitz and Chord Overstreet star in this raunchy comedy. Available digitally and on demand starting Tuesday.
“Dateline – Saigon”:
This documentary, new to DVD and digital formats, recounts the story of five young journalists — including David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan and Peter Arnett — who covered the Vietnam War and decided to tell the truth. Available digitally and on demand starting Tuesday.
This new documentary tells the story of a legendary rock club, the Saxon Pub in Austin, Texas. Available digitally starting Tuesday.
New on Sofa Cinema
Milwaukee Film's online movie portal Sofa Cinema gives you a window through which you can rent new and recent independent movies, with part of the proceeds going to Milwaukee Film. See the website for details:
mkefilm.org/ sofacinema.
New release beginning Friday:
“In My Blood It Runs”:
This documentary follows the life of Dujuan, a 10-year-old boy living in a town in Australia where 100% of the youths in detention centers are Aboriginal, and where his intelligence and leadership are ignored by a westernized system designed to marginalize him.
Other new movies on major streaming services
Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti play an unlikely couple who, after a chance meeting at a disastrous wedding, wake up the next day to discover they're going to replay the day over and over and over in this new “Groundhog Day” comedy that had been ticketed to theaters before everything shut down. Debuting Friday on Hulu.
“Nothing Stays the Same: The Story of the Saxon Pub”:
“Palm Springs”:
Charlize Theron leads a covert band of mercaneries with one unique skill: They can't die. Unless, that is, an outfit seeking to monetize their superpower has its way. Gina Prince-Bythewood (“Love & Basketball”) directed this big-budget (for streaming) action movie. Debuting Friday on Netflix.
A stand-up comedian (Sasheer Zamata) invites her ex-boyfriend (Tone Bell) on a weekend trip to her mother's country bed-and-breakfast, and he complicates things by bringing along his new girlfriend (DeWanda Wise) in this new comedy. Starting Saturday on Hulu and Amazon Prime.
Nia Long plays a woman who, feeling her marriage is a little stale, agrees to go out for drinks with an old friend (Omar Epps). When he wants to take things to the next level, she shuts him down, but he won't take no for an answer in this new thriller. Starting Thursday on Netflix.
This documentary on the risky world of child acting is directed by a guy who knows something about it — Alex Winter, best known as Bill to Keanu Reeves' Ted — talking with a range of child-acting survivors, including Evan Rachel Wood, Jada Pinkett Smith, Henry Thomas, Mara Wilson, Milla Jovovich, Wil Wheaton and the late Cameron Boyce and Diana Serra Cary. Starting Tuesday on HBO Max.
“The Weekend”:
“Fatal Affair”:
“Showbiz Kids”: