Brilliant Cruise transcends film.

Rating: 5/10 (31 July 2000)

It's enough to make one weep. The first hour of this film is good fun, an exposure of a certain kind of American bluster, schizophrenically epitomised in Mr. American Bluster himself, Tom Cruise (hard business; 'touchy-feely' ethics). The second half replaces this with another kind of bluster - cute kid, family values, success, reconciliation, redemption. With a cute taste of misogyny too - women are either ridiculed divorcees (Crowe gets to mock two American bugbears in one - women and collectives), hard-nosed career, er, ladies (independent! Sexually liberated! Careerist! Help mummy!), sterile wisecrackers, or dippy drips who despite being (presumably highly qualified) accountants in a multi-million dollar company, are dumb enough, despite being single mothers, to give up a well-paying job for a phoney ideal, are prepared to marry a cynical creep AND aren't actually impressive human beings in their own right, juggling family and career, but a kind of spare limb, a foot maybe, lying around, waiting to make Tom Cruise 'complete' - i.e. just another mother. Same with Rod Tidwell, less a character than a series of amusing bits, whose own rich family life is just a reflection of what Maguire's is not. His blackness, sponged by Maguier, probably makes the latter's whiteness complete too.
This is a shame. Crowe has never been the most visual of directors - you can see why he worships Billy Wilder - and the second half gets bogged down in dispiritingly trite speeches; but the first half is a pretty good deconstruction of Cruise's persona, brilliantly developed by Paul Thomas Anderson and John Woo in 'Magnolia' and 'Mission Impossible 2'. All the familiar signifiers are there, presented in the classically flattering stylistic manner - the smile, the perfect hair, the easy beauty, the suits; but mostly the talk, the promises, the hyperactive loghorrhea, hiding a very empty core, a despair visualised by some sequences of dreamlike blue; we can see Maguire slowly break down, swallowed up by his own vacuity. The 'mission statement' is a typically empty-headed response, a way to order the emptiness of his life, a kind of American dream, a purpose; the very American need to break ruts and drive for something, which is much easier than just changing what's wrong with the rut.
Unfortunately, Crowe takes him at his word. It is possible that the denouement, as with Rod's concussion, is pure fantasy, a fake injection of uplift in what had become a very gloomy film - Jerry's increasing the uppers to blot out some serious downers (and it is reassuringly American and capitalist that heart does actually mean money anyway). Jerry is like a Western hero, interminably restless, roaming freely over states, but he is also a parasite, a horse dependent on a rider, a man of no active power, hanging on the decisions and betrayals of others. This is like some kind of metaphor for (American) life, and the heterosexual family unit provides security against it, a fixed abode, a sense of coherent, whole identity and self-worth, a properly defined masculine role. No thanks.
But, although it's hard to take a multi-millionaire egoist telling us to reevaluate our values, Tom Cruise is amazingly good, giving a depth of performance so rare in today's mainstream cinema, awesomely self-aware, revelling in the blurring of star and role.