Last week, I was mildly surprised to hear that Tom Cruise and Katie
Holmes are getting divorced. Why, only a few days before I had read an
interview in People magazine in which Cruise kept banging on about “Kate” and his daughter Suri, and how he was looking forward to a happy 50th
birthday celebration with his family. And then this Tuesday Tom turned
50, alone… How could it all have gone so wrong so quickly?
I’ve had a soft spot for Cruise since 2002, a year I spent
exclusively watching movies made by one of the Toms, either Cruise or
Hanks. I was forced into this because I was living in Russia, where
English language movies were in short supply. A recent encounter with a
preposterous French movie entitled Trouble Every Day had led me
to the epiphany that while bad art house films were just that, even the
worst Hollywood movies at least had high production values. It was time
for a Tom.
And so periodically I’d walk from my apartment just off the Arbat to
the underpass at Smolenskaya metro station and inspect the VHS (and
later, DVD) selection on offer. Working on the assumption that Hanks
made better movies than Cruise, I began with his oeuvre. But the first
Hanks movie I saw, Castaway, was awful, especially when the
blobby man with the beard started talking to a ball, and then cried when
the ball went away. Hanks was unpersuasive as a hit man in Road to Perdition, and merely OK in Catch Me if You Can. I couldn’t bring myself to watch The Terminal, in which he plays a bumpkin Eastern European moron trapped in an airport.
Having discovered that Tom Hanks was rancid (although he does a tolerable turn as a child’s plaything in the Toy Story films, I’ll grant you), I turned my attention to Tom Cruise. I think I watched Vanilla Sky
first, in which he plays a man with a rubber scar on his face who feels
sad. Lots of people hated this movie, but I thought it was tolerable,
even though it was shameless rip off of Philip K. Dick’s novel Ubik.
Next I watched Jerry Maguire, A Few Good Men, Mission Impossible II, The Last Samurai- you know, the classics. They
all had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and a more or less coherent
plot, so that was nice. I could see that Cruise always tried hard, that
he never just knocked off a film for the cash. I especially liked it
when Tom Cruise broke into a sprint, which was often, and in Minority Report I
was really impressed by the scene where he runs really fast in a
straight line because he has to get somewhere in a hurry and doesn’t
have a car. I don’t remember where he was going, but I do remember him
running. He was running fast.
And as the films rolled by I even saw a few Tom Cruise performances
that were actually very good. For instance, his turn as a hit man in Collateral is excellent, even if the plot is incoherent, and he makes for an exceptional sex guru in Magnolia. Perhaps his best role ever however is as the profane film producer Lev Grossman in Tropic Thunder, where he is much funnier than he is in Rain Man.
In short, Tom Cruise is OK by me. He loves his work, he tries hard
and he’s nice to his fans. Also, he’s smaller than I am which is nice.
So why do people think he’s a weirdo?
Well, there’s all that Scientology stuff I suppose- Xenu and the
Thetans and all that. Indeed, there are rumors that Katie Holmes left
him because he was preparing to dispatch their daughter to a hardcore
Scientology indoctrination camp.
Scientology doesn’t bother me. I once paid a visit to the Scientology
center on Hollywood Boulevard and had myself hooked up to an e-meter,
which was supposed to read my emotions. The nice lady asked me to think
about something stressful and the dial moved. “See! It’s true!” she
said. I wasn’t convinced. But, I ask you, do Scientologists throw acid
in girl’s faces, or burn down schools? Are they wrecking the relics of
Timbuktu? No, so live and let live is what I say.
But what about all that jumping on the couch business? Ah,
but that only made me like Tom Cruise more. There he was, a man in his
mid-40s, jumping on a couch on TV. He reminded me of Alyosha Karamazov,
about whom Dostoevsky wrote: “He had gone beyond the fear of appearing
ridiculous.”
In fact, Tom Cruise started out that way, dancing in his underwear in Risky Business.
And perhaps this is what I really admire about Tom Cruise: that he
jumps on couches, dances in his underwear, and believes in aliens. He is
what he is, and he has no fear that you will consider him strange for
that.
And so I say, Viva Tom Cruise! Although Eyes Wide Shut really was a lot of rubbish.
Dostoevsky: He understood Tom Cruise