Tom Cruise
And should Jurassic park?
Gareth Higgins on TOM CRUISE
Tom Cruise finally received an Oscar last week - at the Governors’ Awards, where the Academy recognizes people who deserve the statue but haven’t won it yet. While it could be seen otherwise, these honorary awards are not an afterthought, but have become a mark of distinction, especially given the role of luck in whether or not a movie or individual won in any given year. The Oscars have never been exclusively about affirming quality; nobody seriously thinks that the list of Best Picture winners equates to the Best Films ever made. It’s the same with actors, often rewarded for an entire career’s work with a statute ostensibly for one of their lesser movies (Al Pacino was nominated for the epochal The Godfather (and Part II), Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon but won for Scent of a Woman - a lovely, yet predictable film). And then there are figures like Tom Cruise, who seem to personify movies, but whose fame somehow prevents them being taken seriously as cinematic artists. Cruise has been nominated as an actor on three occasions, but has never won competitively; we may not think of him as an outstanding performer, but I think that is nothing more than confusing profile with superficiality.
Consider those nominated performances and ask yourself if he is not indeed one of our greatest actors - in Born on the Fourth of July (immersed in the life of a traumatized and paralyzed veteran and activist for compassion), Jerry Maguire (an everyman trying to make his life work and his work life-giving, who takes a risk for what he believes in, and makes us utterly believe in him), and Magnolia (where he is both psychologically and near-literally naked, and manages to make an initially repulsive person a figure of deep empathy). He does all these things while having one of the most recognizable faces on the planet; and he’s been doing it for nearly forty years.
Along with those three films, try these:
The Color of Money - cocky, feisty, sexy, and ultimately no match for Paul Newman (one of Cruise’s own antecedents), whose charisma is reawakened by sparring with the young buck.
Eyes Wide Shut - where one of the most famous, and therefore most powerful men in the world is reduced to an emotionally vulnerable wreck by his inability to “perform” and his fear of that very vulnerability.
Minority Report - in which he absolutely owns the sense of being a rat in a maze chased by a blinding - and weaponized - searchlight (and the sequence when he and Samantha Morton are on the run together is one of the most gripping hide-and-seeks in cinema).
Rain Man - the movie where he first started to be taken seriously. Dustin Hoffman’s performance is more conspicuous, but that movie depends on the two of them mirroring, welcoming, and pushing each other. They’re perfectly matched.
Collateral - I truly think that some people dismissed the brilliance of his illustration of coldness in Michael Mann’s captivating nighttime thriller because they were distracted by his hair.
Vanilla Sky - almost forgotten now, but Cameron Crowe’s remake of Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los Ojos is gorgeously crafted, with a real sense of the emptiness of the space inhabited by people whose financial wealth deceives them into thinking they have everything; I can’t think of anyone else who could have been more convincing in the lead role.
Then there’s Lions for Lambs (directed by Robert Redford and therefore another collaboration with one of his forerunners), Valkyrie, and A Few Good Men - all films about integrity and courage, all worthy of the goal.
Of course there are the missteps, if not at the box office, at least in terms of the quality of the package - Days of Thunder and Far and Away are both over-the-top and sentimental, and don’t earn either; Cocktail was a vehicle to capitalize on Top Gun’s explosive announcement that a star was born - it’s far too slick to carry the weight of what it’s actually about: ambition, failure, grief, and starting again; The Firm is overstuffed - and it’s one of the rare Cruises where we don’t actually believe he’s vulnerable. But Top Gun really is one of the best films of its kind: massive action containing heartfelt relationships and credibly high stakes; its sequel Top Gun: Maverick is just as good. (And if you haven’t seen Oblivion, it’s one of the most genuinely interesting large-scale science fiction movies of recent years.)
But I find myself wanting to highlight the Mission: Impossible movies as the heart of Cruise’s career. It’s notable that he has produced each of them, shepherding more than an idea, but choosing directors and discerning an arc for Ethan Hunt - a hero who manages to always be in the right place at the right time, but only because his team, his family all work together to get him there. The pleasures of the Mission: Impossible movies is that they marry magnificent, heart-elevating craft (with humans appearing to be at risk, and only judicious use of computer-generated imagery) to a sense of narrative substance. The people behind these movies - Cruise chief among them - actually give a damn about giving the audience something to justify going to the cinema. It may be bread and circuses, but this is high quality granary bread from an artisanal baker, and the circus really does feature death-defying acts, heart-stopping romance, and the supporting cast aren’t merely window-dressing. The most recent Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is one of the all-time great action movies, but also one of the all-time great movies about the fate of humanity mattering more than the fate of any particular tribe or nation. It has one of the most nerve-wracking man-stuck-in-an-enclosed-space-trying-to-save-the-world sequences, one of the most plausible villains (as far as these things go), and one of the most ridiculous plots ever to also feel like it could actually happen. And Cruise doesn’t dominate - this is a movie in which talents as distinct as Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales, Henry Czerny, Angela Bassett, Shea Wigham, Hannah Wadingham, and Janet McTeer all get to own the screen for a moment or more.
That may be the least noticed aspect of Tom Cruise’s career - he is no doubt a star; but he’s not a lone wolf. We can imagine ourselves being part of the team. We may feel that we know less about him as a person than most celebrities - he doesn’t give much away in interviews; but it’s widely known that he’s often first on set, and stands in line for lunch like everyone else. He returned his Golden Globes as a protest against the lack of diversity among the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. His famous anger on a Covid-protocoled set was edgy, though he also gave the crew members a second chance. But I don’t think we need him to give a confessional interview to tell us who he really is. I wish he’d make more Magnolias (and his upcoming film with Alejandro G Iñárritu might be just that), but whatever else is true, I think he’s a man who loves cinema, is grateful for the chance to make movies, and believes that the audience is worth fighting for.
Kathleen Norris: ENOUGH JURASSIC
Many in Hawaii have a special affection for Steven Spielberg’s 1993’s Jurassic Park, as much of the movie was filmed in the islands. The spectacular 400 foot waterfall that dwarfs a helicopter as the film begins is Manawaiopuna Falls in Kauai’s Hanapepe Valley. Kualoa Ranch, on Oahu’s Windward side, is the place with the sloping field and the large tree branch that Sam Neil and the two children crouch under, as a flock of giant herbivores flee from a T-Rex. It’s a popular site for tourists to take selfies. The ranch still offers a Jurassic Adventure tour that visits filming sites at Kualoa and in two nearby valleys.
The storm in the film that spoiled the plans of one villainous character to leave the island with stolen dinosaur DNA was not a Hollywood creation, but Hurricane Iniki, one of the rare hurricanes to make a direct hit in Hawaii. The crew was filming on Kauai as Iniki was bearing down, and they quit only when Civil Defense authorities ordered them to stop and seek shelter.
I was one of millions who thoroughly enjoyed the movie, the fine acting by Neil, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum, and the suspense leavened by moments of comic relief. In the midst of one terrifying scene in which a T-Rex is pursuing a car, the frantic driver is even more unnerved as he spots this in his rearview mirror: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” As in any great action adventure film, the good guys — including two children — prevail, and the bad guys fall prey to their own hubris. As expected, we also lose some good guys as they sacrifice themselves to save others.
Spielberg directed a good sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, that was released in 1997, with Goldblum returning and the welcome addition of Julianne Moore and Pete Postlethwaite. Once again, scientists gone rogue and greedy corporate executives wreak havoc, and endangered children are rescued, after being terrorized by dinosaurs large and small. By the time Jurassic Park III appeared in 2001, Sam Neil is back, as a renowned paleontologist, but Steven Spielberg is out. William H. Macy and Tea Leone do a credible job as parents searching for their son who has gone missing on what is now a dinosaur preserve, but the story line is weak and predictable, if you’ve seen any of the previous films. In subsequent films: Jurassic World in 2015, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom in 2018, and Jurassic World: Dominion in 2022, the plots become ever more formulaic and absurd, containing volcanic eruptions, meet-cute romances, and as always, a few survivors escaping death by dinosaur via helicopter.
The latest film in the series, Jurassic World Rebirth, feels less like a rebirth than the rehashing of exhausted material. The actors, notably Scarlet Johansson and Mahershala Ali, do a good job with the cheesy lines they’re given. But they’re defeated by material so stale that I was disheartened to realize that the most interesting thing about the movie was figuring out which characters were expendable, and which would soon die in the maws and claws of gigantic beasts. It wasn’t much of a task. The children survive, of course, and you can wonder if the rescue helicopter and its crew will be expendable and if so, if the characters you knew would survive will eventually make their escape.
One friend, a movie nerd like myself, found this film “the most cynical, soulless thing” he’d seen all year. He didn’t blame the director, Gareth Edwards (whose work he likes, especially Rogue One), so much as producers and studio executives pressuring him to make a studio blockbuster.
In his novel Jurassic Park Michael Crichton stretched genuine science in a brilliant way, taking a story about a paleobiologist who discovered that amber could preserve fossilized insect DNA and imagining the restoration of dinosaurs. Steven Spielberg made two great action films based on Crichton’s work. But the diminishing quality of the “Jurassic” movies suggests that it’s time to give them a rest. Unfortunately, the new film has grossed over $865 million worldwide, so more are likely to follow. But life is short, and I’m leaving the park behind.
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