Still a leading man after 36 years, Cruise represents a kind of American ideal.
Still a leading man after 36 years, Cruise represents a kind of American ideal.
C ary Grant, one of the most enduring leading men of all time, became a major star in 1937 and retired 29 years later. John Wayne blew up in 1939 and kept going until 1976. Both of them were old and haggard by the time their last pictures arrived. Tom Hanks, who became a star in 1984 with Splash, is now doing avuncular, graybeard roles. The indestructible Clint Eastwood, who boasts of the longest career of any major Hollywood star in history, hit it big in 1964 but by 1986 was playing a cantankerous old gunnery sergeant in Heartbreak Ridge and in 1992 was the ancient avenger William Munny in Unforgiven.
All of this perspective is necessary to comprehend the scale of what Tom Cruise has pulled off. He became a name in 1983’s Risky Business and a bankable star in Top Gun three years later. Thirty-six years after that, Cruise not only remains one of Hollywood’s key leading men, but today he’s bigger than ever. Top Gun: Maverick opened over Memorial Day weekend with an astonishing $161 million take at the domestic box office, Cruise’s best opening to date. It was the equivalent of Tom Brady notching a career-best 5,316 passing yards in his 22nd season. Actually, it was as if Brady had thrown for more than 10,000 yards last year, given that Cruise’s previous career-best opening, 2005’s War of the Worlds, earned only $64 million in its first three days at the domestic box office. Who hits a career best at anything at age 59?
Top Gun: Maverick doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is: two hours of Tom Cruise being completely awesome. Cruise will be 60 in a month, hence old enough to be a fighter pilot’s grandfather, and Jon Hamm, who plays the crusty old admiral who keeps telling Pete “Maverick” Mitchell why he can’t do things (fat chance!), is nine years younger than Cruise. Cruise isn’t scaling down to character parts or mentor roles. He’s still the center of attention. Everybody else gets old and crusty, but Tom Cruise just stays the same.
Cruise has made a few questionable career choices, but with the revival of the Top Gun franchise and the ongoing success of the Mission: Impossible series he willed into existence, he and the audience have made their peace. We don’t ask Tom Cruise to give us nuance or depth. We don’t want him to be tortured or complex. We just want to see Tom Cruise being completely awesome on the screen, and since what he loves most is to be completely awesome on the screen, Top Gun: Maverick is the ideal cultural landmark to announce that we are well and truly done with Covid. No movie released since the pandemic began has attracted so many grownups to the multiplex.
Cruise may be a strange man off the screen, but when he’s in movies he represents the joy of being completely as advertised. He is all surface, all gleam and swagger and punchy one-liners. These days even James Bond is gloomy, tortured, and mortal. But a Mission: Impossible movie that ends with Tom Cruise getting killed is inconceivable. What would be the point? He is our American avatar, the man who always gets the job done and doesn’t moan about his angst along the way.
Cruise is capable of going deep, but evidently he prefers not to. In the best performance he ever gave, as a shallow pickup artist who hates being exposed as something other than who he is on the surface in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, Cruise seemed for the first time to rummage around inside his own persona and acknowledge that the cocky born salesman with the smile visible from space was a sham. In those years Cruise was stretching his muscles, taking on a lot of risky roles — playing an Irish immigrant in the melodramatic Far and Away, a seemingly gay French vampire in the ridiculous Interview with the Vampire, a doctor lost in his sex dreams in Eyes Wide Shut — but he was never the best choice to play weird or twisted characters. He’s the guy who whizzes around on motorcycles without a helmet. He’s the guy who audaciously sneaks into a test airplane and takes it up to Mach 10.
Most actors of his generation aspired to be like the great Method actors who preceded them — the Pacinos, De Niros and Hoffmans. These men wanted to roll up their sleeves and get dirty, often in the service of films about dark undercurrents in the American spirit. Cruise turned back toward star magnetism. His signature characters are breezy American archetypes who unashamedly chase riches by franchising (Cocktail), selling Lamborghinis (Rain Man), or making deals for pro athletes (Jerry Maguire). Jerry Maguire may have to start over again after he gets fired, but there’s no question that he’s going to head right back to the top with his new firm. A snarky take on American hypocrisy and the depredations of capitalism, such as Cruise’s 2017 dud American Made, is not his brand. That isn’t what we want to see.
Cruise is supposed to be a salesman for America, or at least a Hollywood version of this country: brash, flashy, loud, proud. Cruise’s films — the ones people actually go to see — celebrate riches, fast cars, and faster airplanes. At TG:M, you can almost hear the audience thinking: Wait a minute, there are going to be no surprises whatsoever and everything’s going to be exactly like it was in the Eighties? Hell yeah! At some point we all got old and everything got way too complicated. Tom Cruise is the man to reverse all that, to boil everything down to the basics. He keeps things simple. He makes things clear. Crystal.