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Watching Magnolia at the weekend for the first time in ages, reminded me of the genius of Paul Thomas Anderson, a fresh-faced 30 years old when he made it (this fact alone is enough to send me into a spiralling depression). It’s an astonishing and audacious film, and while the entire ensemble delivers award-worthy performances, it’s Tom Cruise who stands out in particular. As sex guru Frank T.J. Mackey, delivering his now-famous “Respect the cock and tame the cunt!” mantra (which has been sampled on numerous house music tracks) to a testosterone-fuelled conference room, it’s like watching a new, exciting version of the actor perform.
As impressive as this first sequence is, it’s the stripping away of his bloated and grotesquely self-assured façade, during an interview where his past life is unearthed, where Cruise really shows what he’s capable of as an actor. Anderson must have tread where others had previously failed (or feared) to do so, and talked to Cruise about bringing his own personal history of paternal estrangement to the character. It’s a theme throughout the film and one which occupies the latter part of his arc, when Mackey manages to do what Cruise couldn’t, and reach sort kind of closure with his dying father. What we also see in the interview scene is the kind of meltdown which Cruise the person (before the notorious ‘couch-hopping’ incident) had strenuously avoided in his own professional career, achieved mainly on his reliance of a meticulously guarded PR team. Subverting the public’s perceptions of him and free of his own self-enforced safety net, Cruise is mesmerising.
It’s not the only time he’s stretched himself as Born on the Fourth of July demonstrated ten years earlier. An attempt by Cruise to shed his poster boy image, he acquits himself extremely well in the role of paraplegic Vietnam vet Ron Kovak, although his efforts are undermined somewhat by director Oliver Stone’s overly-sentimental direction. Frustratingly, Cruise’s follow-up role to Magnolia in the 2000 summer blockbuster Mission Impossible II saw him revert back to his usual narcissistic self - all slow-mo, ‘look at amazing me’ gestures, much to the detriment of the film.
Now pushing fifty, he’s not quite in the same box office position he was a decade earlier, with contributing factors to this being his ill-advised Scientology comments and the tabloids whisperings which followed. He was fine as the villain in Collateral, but this character still hinged on the Hollywood archetype we’ve seen numerous times before. It would be far more interesting if Cruise ditched the more obvious leading man roles and concentrated on acting in edgier, independently-minded productions. Ironically, nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar for Magnolia, Cruise lost out to Michael Caine – an actor who has embraced growing older and delivered some fine character performances in the later stages of his career.
Having just watched a trailer for this summer’s Day and Knight, an action-romance which reunites him with his Vanilla Sky co-star Cameron Diaz, it looks as if Cruise is repeating the same stuff reminiscent of his earlier films. I think it’s time for him once again to work with the right director and jettison his ego-centric choice of roles (think more ‘Tropic’ than ‘Days of’) and the constraints they bring to his performance.
Looking back at his career, I’m sure he would like the term maverick to be used in explaining his range and not just referring to a past character he played.
Film can be a wonderful teacher. Through the medium we can learn all about different aspects of human nature and behaviour. As you can imagine, as a young teenager the sex part of this proved particularly intriguing to me.
There was enough proper porn to educate my friends and I during the school holidays (thanks largely to someone’s dad who possessed a Larry Flynt-esque volume of shoddy, mostly unwatchable Betamax and VHS), but those weren’t the sort of films you could borrow for home use. I watched the mainstream products to educate myself, although there were a few distractions along the way:
I remember my sister, around six at the time, walking in on the scene with Richard Dreyfus banging the maid (rather enthusiastically I may add) in Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Being in my early teens, it was still an awkward age for me to try and explain what was happening on screen, although any worries soon dissipated as my sister quickly deduced that the two were in- fact 'doing exercises' to which I wholeheartedly agreed.
My dad once recorded Rita, Sue & Bob Too for me to watch when I was 13. I don’t know if this was some kind of half-hearted attempt on his behalf to stealthfully introduce me to the old birds and bees, or maybe he just genuinely thought his son would like to see what grubby sex could look like. Whatever his intentions, it was certainly an eye-opener. I’ve actually grown to really appreciate and embrace this film (anyone who says they don’t like it is being snobby) but the disturbing image of Bob’s ass frantically bobbing up and down, mid-coitus in the front seat of his Ford Cortina, has been forever seared into my brain. This was made by the late revered British film-maker Alan Clarke and it’s still the funniest and most realistic depiction of sex I’ve seen in a film.
If there was ever a need for a remote control which could magically rewind or fast-forward events in the actual real world, it would have been particularly useful for one evening in my childhood when I settled down to watch Risky Business with my Mum present. To give you an idea of how young I was, I didn’t think to read the synopsis in the Radio Times and it was probably past my bedtime anyway. I’m not even sure my Mum knew what was on until she peered up from her newspaper about 20 minutes in to witness The Cruiser groping an semi-naked Rebecca De Mornay from behind, and then shluping her in all different positions and areas around his parent’s house, including the oak staircase.
It was one of those moments when any sign of movement on my behalf would have acknowledged the acute and overbearing embarrassment I was feeling. I think I actually held my breath for a couple of minutes before limply excusing myself. Was my Mum unaware of the torture that I was going through at that moment? - probably not. Situations like that are much more heightened when you’re at that age.
I think I was around the age of 14 when my parents (with my Mum's involvement this time) handed me a copy of an old (and very dated) 60’s sex farce called Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush they’d recorded off telly the night before. It had been a film they had watched as a young couple (shudder) and for some reason, I guess they felt that this was something I might learn from or maybe it was their way of providing some kind of anthropological snapshot of their own teenage years. Whatever they intended, the film wasn’t sexy nor enlightening. It was shit.
