Are You Cruise-ing Me?

Sometimes Facebook surprises me. Every once in awhile among the political diatribes, baby pictures, personality quizzes, and more baby pictures I find a post that makes me stop and say, "Oh- I should turn that into an LWM post." So leave it to James Corden and his Late Late Show writing staff to make me consider a post about Tom Cruise.

I'm not the hugest fan of Tom Cruise as a person. He has made a career of pontificating about his sci-fi cult and messing up Oprah's couch cushions. But as this creative Cruise retrospective attests, Cruise is a genuine movie star who has been making hit (and sometimes shit) movies for 35 years.

So before I think better of it, here are my Top 5 Tom Cruise Films:

Legend (1985)

Director Ridley Scott followed up his hits Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982) with this visually stunning fairy tale. The Lord of Darkness (Tim Curry with facial prosthetic makeup out the wazoo) is tired of living in the shadows so he hatches a plan to escape by stealing unicorn horns. But the protector of the woods, Jack (young Cruise in short-shorts) and Princess Lily (Mia Sara) with the aid of various elves and fairies fight to get the horns back and return the world to proper good-evil balance. It's your standard "hero saves the princess from the giant red-hooved British actor" story.

There were a lot of fairy tale-inspired films in the '80's: Dragonslayer (1981), The Dark Crystal (1982), Krull (1983), Labyrinth (1986), and Willow (1988) so it was clearly a trend. Maybe it was escapism from the Reagan Era Cold War. Or maybe it was all that Dungeons & Dragons in the air. 

But Legend is the most visually stunning of the lot. Scott's grasp of scope and design capture the joy and wonder of fantasy, as well as the terror and darkness inherent within the things that exist just beyond the light. With Scott, the divisions between safety and danger while clearly delineated, are always fragile, and easily overwhelmed.

Cruise is young and like a latter-day Mickey Rooney, full of overwhelming energy and focus. His Jack is a puck-ish innocent yearning to fall-in love- and cross the sexual threshold from boy to man. It is an instance where the actor's natural energy serves the part well.
Which is not always the case with  Mr. Cruise...

Top Gun (1986)

I can't help but look back upon this testosterone-fueled jet-fest fondly. It was EVERYWHERE when I was a sexually budding 14-yr. old. The radio blared "You've Lost That Loving Feeling", and the airplane graveyard-set MTV video for Berlin's Oscar-winning "Take My Breath Away"- well it took my breath away.

The raw masculinity in this flick is like a Brut ad gone wild. The locker room scenes. The volleyball. The chest-thumping rivalry between Maverick (Cruise) and Iceman (the once slim Val Kilmer). The male bonding- not totally able to mask the tenderness felt between men- but not exposing it either.

Something felt exciting about this all-male world. Sure Maverick boned Charlie (ironically a male character name for the female lead played by Kelly McGillis) but his heart belonged to his cockpit buddy, Goose (Anthony Edwards before his hair died). I'm not saying Top Gun made me gay- but it probably finished what Victor Victoria (1982) started. 

A Few Good Men (1992)

Cruise is back in uniform, but this time he is Lt. Daniel Kaffee, a young Navy lawyer defending  a couple of Marines at Guantanamo who are accused of murdering a fellow soldier. But Kaffee and co-defender Lt. Cdr. Galloway (Demi Moore in her prime) suspect the two soldiers were carrying out a "code red"- the military's version of extreme hazing and go after who they think issued the order, cigar-chomping Col. Jessup (Oscar-nominated Jack Nicholson at his scenery-chewing best).

The film is based on the play of the same name and director Rob Reiner does a proficient job of moving the action out of the courtroom and into the larger world outside. Distilled in the oft-repeated/parodied "You can't handle the truth!" scene, this film is about the disparate worlds of the military, and the citizens it is meant to protect.

Can we protect freedoms by violating them? Who gets to make that call? Most movies explore this moral question on the battlefield, but Men does it in the bloodless arena of a courtroom. The film was nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Actor for Nicholson- but nothing for the fist-pounding, teeth-gritting stylings of Cruise. 

Magnolia (1999)

How do you follow-up a hit dram-com about the porn industry? Well, if you're director Paul Thomas Anderson after Boogie Nights (1997), you make a strange multi-plot dark drama that makes critics and audience alike scratch their heads. Magnolia starts with a murder and ends with a storm of frogs- but in-between there are some amazing performances from an indie star-studded cast.

Julianne Moore is a stand-out as Linda, a trophy wife whose husband Earl (Jason Robards in his final film) is dying of cancer. Linda's a hopped-up mess, and realizes that while she might have married for money, she has fallen in love with her dying husband, and her scene where she is trying to get his lawyer to take her out of the will is emotionally riveting.

Also making a splash is Cruise as Earl's estranged son Frank, who is an Anthony Robbins wannabe whose manic, smarmy mental medicine show turns into a curse and tantrum-filled course in misogyny. Watching his "How to Fake Like You Are Nice and Caring" scene almost feels like a confession. A sly moment where the actor bares his soul under the guise of a crazed character- winking at us as he blurs the line between Frank and Tom. It would earn Cruise his last Oscar nom (to date). 

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

The first time I saw Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut it was for a Cinematic Space class with my college film mentor Professor Joseph McElhaney. And I'm really glad I had his expert guidance in watching the film because it is so much more than it appears- which is Kubrick's point.

Adapted from a 1926 novella called Dream Story, Eyes is about a couple who are struggling with infidelity in their marriage. A strange sense of film fantasy mirroring reality takes hold immediately as the couple (Bill and Alice) is played by real-life husband and wife (at that time) Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. After Alice confesses to a fantasy about a sailor they met on vacation, Bill leaves and embarks on what turns out to be a night of temptation.

From a grieving family member kissing him, to hanging out with a callgirl, to a full-on orgy, Bill does the town- but never does a woman.  The next day Bill re-traces his steps from the night before and discovers that not everything was as it appeared and perhaps a murder was involved.

It's a complicated story. But for me, this film isn't about plot points- it's about the use of film to create and disturb fantasy and reality. Kubrick's goal is to ingeniously weave location shots in with studio set shots to confuse real and dream worlds to mirror the characters' tenuous grip on what they think they know.

Pictures on walls mirror events and styles that happen later. Music and dance lead us in what seem to be never-ending circles- much like Kubrick's sinuous steadi-cam filming. Strings of colored lights and neon tubes create a sense of living inside a dream. Masks and costumes appear throughout. The film ends in F.A.O. Schwartz- arguably a real-world fantasy-land.

Kubrick's gift was to use the cinematic image- itself a fantasy- to further explore the space between what is real and what isn't. Not giving us clear-cut answers- but then real life doesn't do that very often either. 

This post started with Legend and ended with Eyes- because both are rooted in fantasy. It's apt for Cruise because he is an illustrative example of the Hollywood star whose film and personal personae are not always distinguishable from one another.