I wonder why Hanks isn’t getting better movies. It should be his time. He’s our Jimmy Stewart, a heartland guy, good people. As a reader recently put it to me, Hanks remains one of “Hollywood’s gentler souls”. That’s what most moviegoers love about him. Edging toward 53, Hanks is the boy next door grown into an ordinary Joe of a man that we could imagine talking to over the backyard fence.

He’s got, as my mom would say, a nice face, open and honest. What he doesn’t have is the swooning looks of a Brad Pitt or George Clooney; the chiselled hardness of Tom Cruise; the defiant aloneness of Denzel Washington; the crazed passion of Mel Gibson; or the eclectic dramatic moves of Johnny Depp or Robert Downey Jr.

So is it Hollywood then, or Hanks? Probably a bit of both. The passing years have moved him into acting’s Middle-earth, just shy of hell, that place between headlining a movie and the rich character standing slightly left of centre stage. That’s not to say he can’t do both. It’s just that the rules of the town are more interested in another Angels & Demons than in Saving Private Ryan.

The actor is still a big movie star, still averaging 13 movies a decade as he has since the 1980s. He has proven economic power.

Maybe the actor has simply grown tired of the movie game. He’s certainly not creatively dry, having a hand in producing some of television’s most ambitious projects, including the extraordinary performance piece that is HBO’s Big Love and miniseries that embody high-minded quality: John Adams, Band of Brothers and From the Earth to the Moon.

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