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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
After three decades on-screen, who should we compare him to? Redford, Cooper or Johnny Depp? My choice: Troy Donahue.
Aug 5, 2004 | Despite what any of us may think of Tom Cruise, we've all had to get used to seeing him two or three times a year. At first because he was in those big hit movies that you went to because everyone else did ("Risky Business," "Top Gun"), then because he was working with directors and actors whose work you wanted to see.
Martin Scorsese's "The Color of Money" marked the beginning of Tom Cruise's being taken seriously. Without that movie, he very likely would have never worked with the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Oliver Stone or Stanley Kubrick. Cruise didn't seem out of place in "Rainman" or "Eyes Wide Shut," though, mainly because everything else in them was lousy, too. And sometimes he even seemed right for a role. In Stone's "Born on the Fourth of July," Cruise's particular self-involvement as an actor dovetailed with the self-involvement of the movie's subject, paraplegic Vietnam vet Ron Kovic.
But then there came times when Cruise was up against actors at the top of their game. He was like a pompadoured mosquito taking the focus off Paul Newman in "The Color of Money." And in his climactic scene in "Magnolia," crying over his dying father, played by Jason Robards, I almost felt sorry for Cruise; there he was, shaking and crying and emoting, and Robards, playing comatose, completely outacted him.
At a certain point -- maybe because I stopped expecting anything from Cruise -- he stopped seeming so annoying. He worked so hard in "Jerry Maguire" that he almost succeeded in making the character believable. At the least, he put himself in the service of the movie, and his conviction that it was worth doing (whether it was or not) marked one of the only times Cruise seemed like part of a team rather than a grandstander. In "Mission: Impossible," he was well used as something like a human action figure. Brian De Palma's film was an essay on the pride of being a professional in a faceless corporate world, and there was something ironic about having a star who had seemed to embody the facelessness of current movies at the center of it. By using Cruise as a character who represented a dedication to craft as the enemy of corporate anonymity, De Palma was being both sly and subversive -- using Cruise as a weapon against the studio suits who adored him.
Cruise is, of course, hugely famous and popular and rich, but to those of us for whom the word "star" still connotes something both mysterious and identifiable, Cruise has never seemed like one. He's a virtual star, a cipher star. His specialty has been a sort of vacuous intensity, characterized by glaring eyes and slight, cocksure nods of the head as he delivers his lines, usually with the ghost of a smirk on his face. Cruise's acting is all display; he doesn't connect with the people sharing the screen with him. There's no give-and-take, none of the sense of actors discovering each other, playing with each other, challenging each other.
