National Post (National Edition)
HOW TOM CRUISE WENT FROM SUPERSTAR TO SUPER DULL.
HOW INTREPID STAR WENT FROM ARTISTE TO MUNDANE
“Of course, I’d rather be known as a great actress than a movie star,” Naomi Watts confides in Mulholland Drive, as aspiring screen ingenue Betty. “But, you know, sometimes people end up being both.”
At that time, right around the turn of the century, Tom Cruise was both. He was a celebrity of monumental fame and a thespian of incontestable talent. He made big, spectacular action pictures, hundred-million-dollar blockbusters that cast his face on screens across the planet. He made difficult art films for directors intent to draw out his talent. (He produced movies too: small projects of distinction, like Shattered Glass.) There was a stubborn strain of determination in Cruise in those years, inseparable from his stardom. It was as if he couldn’t help but seize on any opportunity to flaunt his range. In 1999 alone, he starred in Eyes Wide Shut for Stanley Kubrick and appeared in Magnolia for Paul Thomas Anderson — the latter secured him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. How did he follow this acclaimed display of artistry? He reprised his role as secret agent Ethan Hunt, in 2000’s US$125-million sequel Mission: Impossible 2.
These days Cruise doesn’t do much flaunting. The only thing he seems determined to prove anymore is that he is in pretty good shape for a man in his mid50s, and even that is getting harder to put across with much conviction. He consents, exclusively, to star in movies that feel engineered to make him look attractive and virile, and often produces these pictures himself, the better to control his public image. He no longer works with self-styled auteurs; he’d rather be directed by deferential unknowns without clout or leverage, so that when push comes to shove he can tell them what to do. The closest he’s come to a creative risk lately is this week’s American Made, which cost $80 million and will vanish from memory the very moment its nationwide theatrical run ends.
Hooting wildly in buttondowns as an everyman charmer, wearing a grin that betrays either mania or despair, Cruise is a performer whose streak of virtuosity — lighting up the screen, to invoke a movie-star cliché — is over. The man is now pitifully mundane.
In Oblivion he skulked on post-apocalyptic ground absent a modicum of charisma, a shockingly anodyne presence. In Jack Reacher and its sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, he struts and preens ridiculously, as every passing character must remark on his machismo; these movies are feature-length efforts to insist that Cruise is still cool. Even the Mission: Impossible franchise has stagnated at the actor’s behest. They used to hire distinctive, individualistic filmmakers to tackle each new instalment. humour about himself, too.
His watchword since has been “safety.” He doesn’t have the strength of reputation necessary to fritter his stock away on volatile auteurs. He doesn’t have the popular affection needed to risk being philandering Bill Harford or misogynistic Frank T.J. Mackey. So now he simply aspires, at best, to be likable. To be the glamorous hero who does the right thing and saves the day. I mean, who could object to a guy like Jack Reacher?
The magnitude of Cruise’s star power at its apex seems all the more remarkable in retrospect — because few stars, if any, could be said to have reached such heights since. Studios don’t tend to sell films strictly on the presence of the actors in them anymore; when they occasionally do, audiences don’t buy them. Chris
Earlier this year, Universal Pictures succeeded in submitting Cruise to this newly diversified, star-hostile system. In The Mummy, a nearly $200-million action-fantasy extravaganza, Cruise starred as Sergeant Nick Morton, whose confrontations with the nefarious Dr. Jekyll (Russell Crowe) were said to lay the groundwork for a forthcoming Jekyll and Hyde film. In short, The Mummy was not a stand-alone picture but the first instalment in what Universal has dubbed its “Dark Universe,” an interlocking series of blockbusters in the fashion popularized by Marvel Studios.
Trouble was, Cruise doesn’t work that way. He re-wrote the script to expand his role and de-emphasize the villain. His character was redeveloped from scratch, and the tone of the film shifted from action-horror to popcorn romp. He even staked out the editing room and offered notes on how the final cut should look. Cruise swiftly proved, in other words, that he’s incompatible with these kinds of Universes. He can’t stand the idea that a movie should value something other than him.
In the end, The Mummy failed and Cruise was justly blamed, though it seems unlikely even still that the man will change. Probably he’ll return to a place of comfort: the familiar Mission: Impossible movies, another Jack Reacher.
It hardly helps that his only interesting performance in recent memory was in an underrated movie that inexplicably flopped: the excellent Edge of Tomorrow. For brief moments onscreen, Cruise seemed willing to have fun with his image again, playing a feeble milquetoast dragged into a battle for which he’s woefully ill-equipped. Did that failure confirm for Cruise that he shouldn’t bother to try? It’s hard to imagine, in 2017, the sort of peculiar, intriguing role that might rouse him into his old determination, that could galvanize him to take a chance and gamble.
It might be too late, given the system, for Tom Cruise to reclaim his title as bona fide movie star. There’s still hope he could become once more a great actor.