BELOVED

I asked around the office the other day if there was anyone who would debate me on the merits of Tom Cruise. Strangely, no one leapt to meet this challenge. Stranger still, I would be taking the pro-Tom position, and they merely had to assemble a case against Tom Cruise, who is attempting a loud, flashy crocodile-grinning return to his previous employment as unimpeachable Hollywood gold. "Knight and Day" — with Cameron Diaz — just opened, the first Cruise-centric summer film since "Mission: Impossible III" in 2006. But nobody bought in.

Which, if you are Tom Cruise, should be chilling. Now that his glare has lost its wattage — as would be reasonably expected of any actor who became a superstar at 21 and is approaching his 48th birthday (July 3) — the guy could use a spirited defense.

Complaint: "He's not believable."

The Defense: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let us not beat around the bush. To quote Viola Davis' CIA director in "Knight and Day," Cruise's character is a spy, and as with all spies, "love, empathy — we trim it right out of them." This is who you see when you see Tom Cruise on a movie screen, isn't it? A wide, insincere grin delivered through a pantomime of human feeling. I get where you're coming from. As critic Peter Rainer wrote about Cruise's performance in "Top Gun" in 1986, "his blank, fixated stare and teeth-baring smile make him seem as flat and despiritualized as a Sunset Strip billboard portrait." Rainer was not wrong, but that was the vanity of a young man still navigating between the glib expectations of his freshly minted star and the uninhibited actor he is at heart, a quality he showed a few years earlier in "Risky Business," "The Outsiders" and the underrated "All the Right Moves."

He is eager to please. That cocksure smirk is often a crutch. Yet, is there another actor as willing to subvert so much bankable charisma as Cruise? Another leading man whose celebrity rests on our need to relate to him who is also fully committed to playing jerks? Allow me to direct you to "Rain Man," "The Color of Money," "Magnolia," "War of the Worlds" and "Jerry Maguire" — films in which Cruise is tender, vulnerable and unlikable. You see an actor pantomiming emotions; I see characters that pantomime because they are learning how to feel. Watch his eyes. Even at Cruise's most assured, there is a palpable fallibility, an assessing quality, as through he is wrestling out an understanding, not a one-liner. It's not that Cruise is emotionally unbelievable, it's that the best of his characters are experiencing a dawning self-awareness and his worst of them noticeably lack any self-awareness.

Complaint: "He's a freak show."

The Defense: I believe the trouble you refer to began in spring 2005. He leapt onto Oprah Winfrey's couch, delivered a series of arm-pumping movements. And that is all. Sorry, hold on. There's more here. Scientology, Brooke Shields, psychiatry, Matt Lauer, blah blah blah. OK, look: He made a few mistakes. But he has done his time and stayed away a while. But while we were busy being irritated with him, we didn't appreciate what we had gained — a rare opportunity to witness an image-conscious superstar go completely off the grid, career-wise. The irony is that the same vulnerability and hints of self-doubt that creep into the edges of his face on-screen are rarely revealed in real life. This may be why you find him a bit creepy.

Complaint: "He plays the same role every time — himself."

The Defense: A tired argument, but understandable. Tom Cruise is a rarity, a star's star — maybe The Last Movie Star, a man whose aura made him so impenetrable as a person he only existed as an image. Like George Clooney, Cruise is cut from old movie star cloth, which requires a little consistency, an iconic sameness only available for minor tweaking. Unlike Clooney, who can feel like the second coming of Cary Grant, Cruise never operated much within the framework of other actors — he didn't mimic the swaggering realism of a James Dean or a Marlon Brando (as many of his contemporaries attempted), and he's never become a narcissistic method chameleon, which is not to say he lacks range. Get past the vehicles big stars leave behind ("Days of Thunder," "Mission: Impossible") and there's his killer in "Collateral," his homoerotic Lestat in "Interview With a Vampire," his bitter vet in "Born on the Fourth of July." If there's a pattern, it's that he swings from iconic to roles that chip away at the facade. Age has helped — the cynicism of "Minority Report" stripped clean the earnestness that clung in "The Last Samurai," and in "Knight and Day," that smile is evolving into a caustic Nicholson mask. But plays himself? If so, let's be grateful. Watching "Rain Man" again, his steadiness opposite Dustin Hoffman now seems like the film's true complexity.

Complaint: "He has terrible taste in movies."

The Defense: Let's be honest. Everyone in this court knows "Knight and Day" is not the best movie Tom Cruise has been involved with; it's not even in his top 10. But let's consider "Knight and Day": It speaks to the actor's shrewd understanding of himself. He wears Ray Bans again. He smiles a lot. He still looks 25. There's a lightness about the picture intended to counter the heaviness of our image of him now. It's meant to remind us that he is who he has been. I liked it. But here's the problem: For the five or six years before "the trouble" began, he moved in intriguing directions — his motivational speaker in Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia" reminded us how well he works in an ensemble, and, love or hate it, Stanley Kubrick picked up on how Cruise uses his face and based "Eyes Wide Shut" around the actor's ability to convey a slow awakening. You say he has bad taste in movies, but paired with the right filmmakers — Cameron Crowe, Steven Spielberg, especially — new dimensions always seem revealed. The problem is, at a moment when Cruise would do well to shed everything we know of him, where are the filmmakers who can help?


By Christopher Borrelli,
cborrelli@tribune.com
Tribune reporter
June 25, 2010


source: ChicagoTribune.Com