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Maybe you saw the trailer for the new non-movie Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt don’t star in together — even though the movie, Tom, and Brad all appear convincing enough, conjured from a server farm with a handful of text prompts.
And before you hit Back, relax: this is not another column about artificial intelligence.
You're welcome, America.
But let's do talk about the man often considered the last true Hollywood star — and when he cares to be, much more than that.
If you haven't, though, you should at least catch a glimpse of the non-movie trailer. Not because it shows off just how good AI video has gotten so quickly, but because if Black Out really were Cruise's next movie, you wouldn't be in the least bit surprised. And while I love a good Cruise action flick, I can't help but think that at this stage in his career, yet another high-octane movie star role would be a real shame.
That's the subject of this week's essay, but first, here's that Black Out trailer.
That doesn't look good enough to blow a C-note on a night out at the movies, but you'd stream it for sure on Paramount/Netflix/HBO/Whatever.
Cruise might prefer to lie a little low after the final Mission: Impossible came out last year, and you can't blame a 63-year-old for that. Not after a grueling shoot like Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, where again, he performed most (all?) of his own stunts. The man is an entertainment machine, but even machines require a little downtime to replace worn parts, tighten the belts, lube the gears, etc.
Not that I'm necessarily saying that after four decades of big-budget action flicks, Cruise is now mostly made up of replacement parts.
Not necessarily, I said — Hollywood is rich and plays by its own rules.
More seriously, however, downtime is exactly what Cruise didn't take after M: I8. He isn't lying low at all.
And Another Thing: Cruise does seem to have made at least one concession to age. My wife pointed out as we exited a movie theater last year, "That's two Mission: Impossibles in a row where he didn't take his shirt off." Melissa knows what she likes. Sadly, I could make the same complaint about Cruise's costar, the delectable Hayley Atwell. Sigh.
His next film, Digger, is due out in October and features Cruise as "The most powerful man in the world," according to IMDB, "on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity's savior before the disaster he's unleashed destroys everything."
We don't know much else about the movie, except that it's helmed by Mexico's two-time Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu — Birdman, The Revenant — and is listed under both Comedy and Drama on IMDB. Also, the teaser poster calls it "A comedy of catastrophic proportions."
I have just two things to say about Digger, but not until after you've watched the teaser.
The two things I have to say are: 1) I'm intrigued, and 2) Thank goodness.
I'm intrigued because we get a delightfully unexpected combination of actor and director, and a teaser that actually teases rather than reveals. Also, we never get a good look at Cruise's face. I'm reminded a bit of George Michael annoying the hell out of his record label for refusing to put his face on the cover of Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1. Columbia Records wanted those pretty-boy looks to sell albums, yet Michael's omission made fans want to lean in and listen closer.
The "thank goodness" is because I want to see the former Risky Business star take more risks, and Digger looks like it could be just that.
There's actually one more thing to say involving two more things, and both of those things are one person.
Did you catch all that? There will be a quiz at the end of this week's essay.
The one person is, of course, Tom Cruise, but there are actually two versions that the franchise action star and the Digger mystery man both hint at. There's "Tom Cruise the last movie star," and "Tom Cruise the hardworking serious actor."
And Another Thing: According to IMDB's Digger trivia page, Iñárritu said that he and Cruise bonded over Mexican food during filming, and that "Cruise ate chili peppers easier than anyone he had ever met." Because, of course, the guy who does his own stunts also taught himself to eat chili peppers like a pro before working with Iñárritu.
"The last movie star" observation has been around so long that it's practically a trope. More than a trope, it's even the name of a 2023 documentary currently streaming on Apple TV.
But it took maybe 17 seconds of search-engine scrolling to find more:
- Tom Cruise Is Hollywood's Last Great Movie Star, Guy at the Movies.
- Is Tom Cruise the last movie star?, Cult MTL.
- Tom Cruise Says ‘I Don’t Want to Be’ the Last Movie Star,' Variety.
- Tom Cruise, Hollywood’s last great star, People.
"Movie star" means two things, and they both apply to Cruise.
The first is having a name that alone draws people into theaters. In Hollywood's glamour days, one spouse saying, "There's a new Cary Grant movie" didn't need a response like, "What's it about?" The happy couple simply went to see the new Cary Grant movie, and then left the theater happy, having seen the new Cary Grant movie.
The other meaning is maintaining a movie star persona that stars never leave home without, and they certainly never show up on social media without it. Were only Robert De Niro or the late Rob Reiner so wise.
Who else but Cruise still combines both?
Aside from some sofa-hopping weirdness during the early days of his marriage to Katie Holmes, and being into Scientology (is he still? I have no idea), about the only thing we know for sure about Cruise personally is that he's really very deeply seriously serious about making movies. Perhaps more importantly, Cruise is serious about making the movies audiences want to see, and he's respectful enough of us not to shatter the image.
And Another Thing: It was a big deal at the time, but I couldn't have cared less about Cruise going so weirdly and publicly gaga over Holmes, because men in love do all kinds of crazy-stupid things. If this weren't a universal and timeless truth, half of our songs and stories would evaporate into nothingness like a Thanos finger-snap.
So, yeah, Cruise is an old-school movie star, and possibly the last.
But when he wants to be, he's also a damn fine actor.
Having watched his movies since Risky Business — which I was certainly not allowed to see at age 14 but certainly saw regardless because Rebecca De Mornay, FTW — and where was I again?
Right, Risky Business, maybe his breakthrough performance. Cruise had the charisma, the looks, and enough acting chops to look like a grown-up star and escape Teen Movie Idol Hell.
Cruise certainly did not start out as what we might call an "actor's actor," like a Marlon Brando, a Daniel Day-Lewis (when he isn't cobbling shoes), an Al Pacino (when he isn't chewing the scenery), or the gone-too-soon Philip Seymour Hoffman. But Cruise is an actor who seems to have worked very hard at getting better at it, just like learning to perform his own stunts or eat chilis with ease.
I'll prove it with just two scenes from two of his best 1990s dramatic roles, Navy attorney Lt. Daniel Kaffee in A Few Good Men, and the title role in Jerry Maguire. Both involve acting drunk, which I didn't select because I'm me but because drunk is one of the most difficult things for an actor to pull off.
Before A Few Good Men's riveting courtroom showdown with Jack Nicholson's Col. Nathan Jessep, Kaffee has a drunken meltdown. He'd gotten his you-know-what handed to him in court that day, and he's convinced that as a result, two innocent men will go to jail.
It doesn't matter how many times you've seen this movie (a couple dozen for me, easy), watch Cruise play drunk opposite another lawyer on his team, LT Sam Weinberg (the criminally underrated Kevin Pollak).
Cruise is fine, not great, playing drunk in this scene. But pay particular attention to what happens at about the 7:30 mark, when — still drunk — he races outside to apologize to Lt. Cdr. JoAnne Galloway (Demi Moore).
Magically, Kaffee is as sober as the dramatic moment requires. Not great acting, and certainly not a great directing moment from Rob Reiner. It's the only false note in a movie practically defined by epic performances by everyone involved.
As I said, acting drunk is hard — because the secret to acting drunk is trying to act sober... and failing.
That takes mad skillz-with-a-z.
Flash forward just four years to Cruise in Cameron Crowe's Jerry Maguire. In this scene, after a failed business trip involving getting decked by his ex-fiancée, Jerry shows up at the home of his assistant/love interest and her sister (Renée Zellweger as Dorothy and Bonnie Hunt as Laurel, respectively). He is convincingly, perfectly drunk.
You don't need to watch the whole ten-minute clip; just the first 90 seconds will do.
Jerry isn't drunk-drunk, just drunk enough to make an ass of himself trying to act less drunk than he is. I have been that guy. Maybe not in that particular living room, but in several that I still can't picture without shaking my head at myself.
But in that scene, it's all Jerry. Aside from the movie-star looks, Cruise is almost nowhere to be found.
For my ticket money, Jerry Maguire might be Cruise's second-best performance, and probably writer-director Crowe's finest picture, period. It's a belated coming-of-age story, it's a romance, it's a sports movie, a budding foster father/son relationship, and a buddy comedy. Mishmashes rarely work so well, in part because we go to movies to escape reality — and real life is never one clear-cut genre. Yet Crowe pulled off a slice-of-life dramedy-hybrid, and he did it with big Hollywood names instead of character actors usually better suited to disappearing into their roles.
In short, Jerry Maguire is the kind of unexpected movie we get too few of.
Cruise's best performance is probably Frank T.J. Mackey in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. Some people truly hate this one — including director Kevin Smith, who wrote an anti-Magnolia running gag into Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back — but please put me proudly in the pro-camp. There are a whole host of reasons I appreciate Magnolia, but rewatching it for the umpteenth time last year, something finally hit me about his growth as an actor
First, watch Cruise as the "Seduce and Destroy" infomercial d-bag we're introduced to early on in the film.
You might not recall, but it was a huge deal in 2000 for Cruise to play such a loathsome creature, so it was wise of him to wait until he was an established A-lister before playing so hard against type.
But Mackey's character is all about the payoff involving his estranged father, Jason Robards, in his final role as TV producer Earl Partridge. Partridge is on his deathbed, zonked out on painkillers, and the two haven't spoken in years.
Mackey is finally persuaded — after some persistent effort from Partridge's hospice nurse, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman — to come home just in time for his father's final moments.
When Mackey does finally try to reconnect, it's reluctantly, at first spitefully, and ultimately too late. This is genuine tragedy, but Mackey can't get to catharsis without it.
Lots of NSFW language in this clip, but it's necessary. Also, keep an eye on Hoffman in the background.
Top Gun-era Cruise could have played Mackey in the infomercial, and A Few Good Men-era Cruise could have handled the death scene. But it required the actor Cruise to finally will himself into becoming to take us through Mackey's character arc — and to make us, in the end, understand him if not exactly like him.
Here's what Cruise's performance in that scene required, courtesy of the YouTube comments:
The fact that Hoffman's reaction here was 100% genuine speaks volumes about how powerful this scene is. Hoffman admitted that he wasn't expecting Tom to get so emotional, and he actually started crying for real because he knew that Tom had gone through something similar with his real-life father and knew that Cruise's emotion in this scene was drawn from that experience.
Not even the actor we watched in Jerry Maguire dared to expose himself like Cruise does at the end of Magnolia.
In the end, as Cruise leaves his dead father's house, drained but at peace, it's almost the actor leaving the movie star behind. But only almost — his next picture was Mission: Impossible II, a totally over-the-top John Woo effort so silly that I can't even watch it any longer.
We've known for 30 years now what Cruise the Actor is capable of, but for every riveting dramatic performance like Eyes Wide Shut or unexpected comedic turn like Tropic Thunder, he gives us at least five action franchise flicks, or pop-fluff one-offs like Knight and Day.
But as much as I enjoy those movie star pictures, I can't help but think he's made enough of them — and that I'd trade all the future big-budget franchise flicks for a few more unexpected parts like Jerry Maguire or whoever the hell Digger Rockwell turns out to be.
So which one is the real Tom Cruise, the actor or the movie star?
Neither. He's an actor in the Old Hollywood sense, someone who understands that whoever the real person is, that's not who audiences pay good money to sit in the dark to watch with their popcorn and their soda. The real person — again, this is very old-school Movie Star — is who he gets to be at home in private.
We don't want the real Tom Cruise to star in any picture.
We want the movie star.
But more than ever, I hope we get the actor.
Last Thursday: Make Gunboat Diplomacy Great Again
