But Tom Hanks is most popular playing members of the Greatest Generation, which he did as a drunken baseball manager in A League of Their Own, which is his best movie, in my opinion
While I agree that Greyhound is, essentially, a very good horror movie it suffers from a singularity: no other character is even roughly outlined. Hanks is a great actor and best when he’s acting off other great actors. A League of Their Own had a great ensemble and it’s exquisitely clear that Penny Marshall, the director, encouraged each and everyone of them to chew any and all available bits of scenery.
But Hanks’ best performances are with and through others:
Punchline: with Sally Field.
Forrest Gump: Sally Field and Robin Wright
The Green Mile: with David Morse, Michael Clarke Duncan, James Cromwell, Sam Rockwell and Michael Jeter.
Saving Pvt Ryan: every actor who happened to wander by the shoot on any given day…
Philadelphia: Denzel, Jason Robards
Road to Perdition: Paul Newman, Daniel Craig, Stanley Tucci.
Those same dudes will quibble that there’s a difference being virtuous and virtue signaling. There isn’t. It is impossible to be virtuous and silent in the face of injustice. They know they’re wrong but they argue anyway
To the point of your article: The Green Mile, Saving Pvt Ryan, Philadelphia and Road to Perdition (and to a lesser extent Bridge of Spies and The Post)are about moral conflict. So-called ‘virtue signaling’ is about positing what one would do when confronted with a moral conflict. Many of Hanks’ movies actually explore both moral conflict and reactions to the moral conflict.
Those who use ‘virtue-signaling’ in the pejorative do so because they are amoral: they are playing a zero-sum game of tactics, strategy, feint and counter-feint. It can never really work because it relies on the contradictory assumption that for some hypothetical observer of the debate, moral suasion is simultaneously dangerously effective and a la carte…
On the entire other hand, the truly virtuous are quite often afraid to use the language of moral suasion because it either A) smacks too much of religion and self-righteousness or 2) enters into abstruse philosophical territory. Therefore they lack the articulation of their deeply held beliefs: defaulting to the frame constructed by the amoral to address the moral conflict.
Lose-lose.
