Everything about Tom Cruise‘s persona depends on the idea that it’s his world, and we just live in it. When he was in his prime (hell, he might still be in his prime at 62 years old), he was a golden child who worked like everything he could ever want was already gift-wrapped on his doorstep. By the time he became a bona fide action star with Mission: Impossible, it became clear he was the only person who could save the world over and over, and even his alleged return to auteur cinema, with his upcoming Alejandro G. Iñarritu film, is about someone trying to save the world from destruction. While he’s worked with many other legendary filmmakers who got great work out of him, few directors have understood how to make the indestructible Tom Cruise feel like a real boy more than Cameron Crowe. Despite only working together twice on Jerry Maguire and Vanilla Sky, Crowe made Cruise feel more “human” than anyone else by forcing him to contend with being a loser.
Cameron Crowe Was Well-Equipped To Examine Tom Cruise’s Stardom
.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2)
In his heyday, Cameron Crowe seemed like a voice of reason who could apply a critical eye to the spiritual malaise of capitalist comfort. His ability to fuse classical romantic dramedy structure with his journalistic feel for the inner workings of unique social circles presented an optimistic, if not downright mawkish, perspective that felt refreshing in the context of the cynical and jaded media landscape of the mid-to-late 1990s. With Jerry Maguire and Vanilla Sky, both films focus on highly successful men who are forced into circumstances where everything they thought they knew is stripped away from them.
Jerry Maguire’s crisis of conscience about truly caring for his clients’ well-being makes him a laughingstock in the world of sports agency, while publishing mogul David Aames’ surviving a severe car crash leads him to question if anything about his life is real. Once powerful emperors of seemingly important molehills who were drastically out of touch with their core humanity, the protagonists are dragged kicking and screaming to a greater self-awareness and appreciation for authentic human expression and connection. If the assignment is “interrogate a character who thinks he runs the world, but is actually empty on the inside and desperately needs to remind himself of what actually matters,” then doesn’t that sound like a prototypical Tom Cruise character?
Cameron Crowe Successfully Kneecaps the Tom Cruise Charisma
It’s not a secret anymore that Cruise is often at his best when he’s playing characters who are secretly losers who masquerade as winners with their charisma, like in Edge of Tomorrow, Tropic Thunder, or most prominently in the film that should have won him an Oscar, Magnolia. In those films, his charisma is inverted to make the smoke-screen more convincing, thereby meta-commenting on his own mystical qualities. That’s nowhere to be found in Cameron Crowe’s films, who’s a dorkishly earnest storyteller whose affection for his characters’ quirks overflows in every frame, for better and for worse. Rather than undermine Cruise’s superpowered and unexplainable charisma, Crowe adamantly flaunts it, taking time to prove that Cruise’s characters really do have something special and kind of untethered about them, only to turn it back on himself and reveal that there’s a cavernous emptiness underneath that charisma.
To paraphrase Maguire’s sole client, Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), Jerry and David both hang by a very thin thread, but that’s what makes their downfalls so compelling. Jerry spends half of his film sweating bullets or openly drunk and in despair, and yet that determination and vulnerability is exactly why Dorothy (Renée Zellweger) falls so hard for him. David’s personality is entirely made up of catalog items and freewheeling frivolity, but his desperation to know what his life truly means also sends him into a tailspin that lets Cruise go to frenetic extremes that are truly upsetting to witness. Even though we’re seeing Cruise suffer the slings and arrows of first-world problems that are much lower in stakes compared to what Ethan Hunt has to deal with, he still carries that underlying frantic mania that sells how badly his characters are spun out of their comfort zone. In other words, in both films, his greatest strength becomes his greatest weakness, and that’s where the money is.
Cameron Crowe Made Tom Cruise Into an Actual Human
Crowe’s proudly uncool sentimentality is actually a perfect fit for Cruise because Crowe embraces Cruise’s inherently off-putting tics and awkward mannerisms to make him feel more tethered to ordinary human anxieties and pressures. Cameron Crowe has made behavior as strange as standing outside a lover’s window with a boombox or wanting to run a private zoo seem like sane life choices, so nothing Tom Cruise does can be truly odd in his world. Jerry and David both exhibit behavior that would be considered creepy, invasive, psychotic, navel-gazing, solipsistic, and extremely insecure. But Crowe gets Cruise into places where he’s been so humbled and so generous, so eagerly holding out for someone’s hand and so willing to be brave in the way that ordinary people have to be brave, that he makes Cruise feel more authentically human than usual.
Of all our major modern film stars, few have so frequently been accused of seeming inhuman as Tom Cruise, with his insistence on constantly almost killing himself on-screen and shouting down crew members off-screen. Perhaps due to his increasingly odd relationship with the press and the outside world, it feels like he’s split up all the different aspects of his persona into different types of films, and never do any of them cross over. We’ve seen him be funny, we’ve seen him be charismatic, we’ve seen him be an actual object of desire, and we’ve seen him be just a plain weirdo who we find oddly fascinating. But as Cruise continues to hyper-micromanage his public image, we rarely get to see him be all of those things at the same time…except for the two times he worked with Cameron Crowe.
