Behind every great man, there is a (great) woman ...

Rating: 8/10 (6 October 2012)

Is "Jerry Maguire" a heart-warming romantic comedy with sports as a subplot? Or a sports drama with romantic undertones? Or is it a fascinating character study introspecting the professional and private life of a sports pro manager, and the way these two poles of his personality influence and affect each other? I like the third option, especially since the title says it all; it's a film about a man named Jerry Maguire.
So, who's Jerry Maguire? At first, he strikes as the kind of character tailor-made for Tom Cruise; Maguire is the guy who's successful both in business and privacy. In fact, the two worlds interact so intensively that you can't quite differentiate between his friends, his colleagues and his clients, even his fiancé, Avery (Kelly Preston) is an ex-athlete. Tom Cruise is the ultimate yuppie and he plays the part perfectly with this extraordinary capability to make himself unlikable enough so you can better perceive his redemption, the same way he did in "Rain Man". But "Jerry Maguire", as if Cameron Crowe, the director, was already aware of its viewers' expectations, is pleasantly surprising because the redemption comes right at the beginning.
After a series of eye-opening incidents, one night, Jerry wakes up and has a sort of breakthrough illumination; he realizes that he wasted his life, by cumulating a generous quantity of clients (professional athletes) without taking time to understand them, to deal with them in a decent way. Struck by this rebirth of humanity, he writes an inspirational memo titled "Things We Think But Do Not Say". The memo elevates him into a sports management guru status except that he's the only one who seems to believe in his new humanistic theories  him, and a young accountant, Dorothy Boyd (Renee Zelwegger) who 'saw the light' through Maguire's inspirational words. And naturally, when Maguire is forced to leave the company, she's the only one who chooses to follow him, she's the kind of women who stand for her beliefs.
Then, Jerry and Dorothy work together with the only client who stays, Rod Tidwell, a football player, smaller than average, flamboyant, truculent  maybe a little too much, and he's played by a scene-stealing (and Oscar-winning) Cuba Gooding Jr. And it's funny how Gooding seems to embody the trademarks of Tom Cruise's archetypal characters through his cockiness and exuberance, but that's part of his 'character', I mean within the movie. Tidwell believes he's a great man, and naturally behind him, there's a woman, his wife Marcee (Regina King) who keeps a vigilant eye on his career's evolution. She doesn't trust Maguire but she gives it a shot. Tidwell trusts him and stays out of loyalty. And Boyd genuinely loves him because she knows there's something good inside that man. Maguire is a good guy because good people believe in him, and it works the other way, too.
Indeed, the 'friends' in the beginning, the pedant Bob Sugar (Jay Mohr) and Avery, not to mention the cocky football player named Cush (whom I just discovered, was the chubby Vern from "Stand By Me"), they all represent the dark side of Maguire's world, and it's only when he gets fired, when he leaves Avery and is betrayed by Cush' father who ends up signing with Sugar (leaving Tidwell as Maguire's only option), it's only when he's an outsider from that cynical world, that we start rooting for him. And Cruise is perfect because it's crucial that Maguire starts being unlikable enough so we can give him the benefit of the doubt and then supposedly change but not enough to make us lower our guard.
The suspicion must remain whether he's a good or a bad guy, if he's going to make it because he believes in his ideas of if he's going to sell his soul back to the devil. It's a two- way process, Rod considers him a friend, not his wife. Dorothy loves him and so does her adorable little kid, Ray, but her sister (Bonnie Hunt) is perplexed. Well, we expect a happy ending, but it's all in the "how" and "when" it will happen. The film deals with human relationships with a powerful mix of cleverness suitable for a comedy drama and touching tenderness, incarnated by the beautiful Renee Zelwegger, in a breakthrough performance that should have earned her an Oscar nomination. She's so adorable, so unbelievably sweet, that she puts something new and unusual in romantic comedies: genuine, shameless, passionate and innocent love.
There is something quite gutsy in the way Cameron Crowe's film tries to cover sports, character study, romance in one story, but the multi-layered format works because Jerry Maguire remains the center of gravity. Dorothy Boyd is a great character because she awakens the best out of Jerry and saves him from his own megalomania. Ironically, Jerry does the same with Rod, also blinded by his own ego too and obsession with money. The way the two stories interact transcends a lot of predictable elements, and even when it doesn't avoid some archetypal situations, the acting makes everything believable. We know that Maguire will get back to Dorothy, but the way it's handled never feels forced and insincere. Jerry listens to Rod who's got the greatest day of his career, and he's simply talking to his wife. Jerry knows he can be a great man, but only if behind him, there's a woman, not any woman: a 'great' woman.
The film is notorious for having introduced many iconic lines in Cinema's Dictionary: "show me the money", "you complete me" and last but not least "you had me at 'hello'", a line that owes more to its awkwardness than romantic appeal. Interestingly, the romantic catchphrase was used in the American Film Institute's 100 Passions montage right after Nicholson's "You make me want to be a better man". And after watching "Jerry Maguire", I understood this is exactly why Dorothy Boyd was a great woman.