Cruise Control: The Hollywood star in stasis | Little White Lies

Acting Up

Cruise Con­trol: The Hol­ly­wood star in stasis

23 Jul 2024

Words by Jadie Stillwell

Silhouetted figure of a person standing on a yellow star-shaped shape against a dark night sky with stars.
Silhouetted figure of a person standing on a yellow star-shaped shape against a dark night sky with stars.
As Risky Busi­ness enters the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, we plot the tra­jec­to­ry of a star seem­ing­ly inca­pable of burn­ing out.

At the end of Paul Brickman’s Risky Busi­ness, Tom Cruise’s Joel Good­sen turns the tables on Rebec­ca De Mornay’s Lana, the sex work­er he’s fall­en in love with despite – or because of – the fact that she’s just conned him into turn­ing his afflu­ent par­ents’ home into a broth­el. Where once Lana had asked Joel to pay her, he now insists she pay him. They joke about pric­ing as Joel’s voiceover plays us out. My name is Joel Good­sen,” he reminds, stress­ing the good son’ pun. I deal in human ful­fil­ment. I grossed over eight thou­sand dol­lars in one night. Time of your life, huh, kid?” Bol­stered by Cruise’s wry deliv­ery, the mes­sage here is clear: this is a kid who has learned, above all, how to sell himself.

If the movie – at base a screwy satire of Reaganomics – ulti­mate­ly nee­dles this les­son, its lead pricks with a boy­ish exu­ber­ance irre­ducible to the bleak machi­na­tions of social repro­duc­tion. (Joel’s sales pitch is the Hol­ly­wood end­ing; Brickman’s more down­beat orig­i­nal sees the two teens part­ing for­ev­er, Lana back to her pimp, Joel to Prince­ton.) That kinet­ic zeal, along with pho­tog­ra­phy by The Beguiled’s Bruce Sur­tees and orig­i­nal synth score by Tan­ger­ine Dream, limns the pic­ture. You can hard­ly fault Cruise, then 20 and still fresh-faced from a brief stint in sem­i­nary school, for being enthu­si­as­tic about a role that takes an ambi­tious vir­gin and makes him over into a pro­fes­sion­al crowd-pleas­er. After all, how else do you become a movie star?

After Risky Busi­ness, which enters the Cri­te­ri­on col­lec­tion this month (the first of Cruise’s films to do so), Cruise was the movie star. By movie star” I mean not an actor” – or rather, an actor only when it suits, as a par­tic­u­lar con­stel­la­tion he might form at will. But gen­er­al­ly, the celebri­ty of Cruise eclipses any tech­ni­cal skill; the brand and com­mod­i­ty of him over­whelms. In part, this means there’s a remark­able con­sis­ten­cy across his entire body of work. Much of what audi­ences would come to expect from a Tom Cruise per­for­mance” is there already in his break­out role: the gus­to that can verge on derange­ment, the live-wire phys­i­cal­i­ty, the fix­at­ed com­mit­ment to some form of worka­holism or hyper-com­pe­tence. All these aspects have made Cruise tremen­dous­ly fun to watch over the past four decades. But what makes him inter­est­ing – Cri­te­ri­on release, aca­d­e­m­ic mono­graph, talk­ing about Edge of Tomor­row after a cou­ple of beers inter­est­ing – is his long-stand­ing com­mit­ment to per­for­mances that inter­ro­gate, and some­times out­right under­mine, the very same things that make him a star.

A young man wearing sunglasses, a grey jacket, and sitting at a table with a red bottle.

This begins as ear­ly as Risky Busi­ness. Both Cruise and Joel, ulti­mate­ly, deal in human ful­fil­ment. (Joel made eight thou­sand in one night? Cruise’s best box office week­end net­ted him near­ly $100 mil­lion.) The film they’re in won­ders whether that’s ever a good thing. Scenes as famous­ly star-mak­ing as the Old Time Rock and Roll” pan­tomime are nonethe­less trou­bled by the exploitable space between an ingénue’s pub­lic per­for­mance and pri­vate child’s play. Cruise’s nascent affin­i­ty for couch­es ren­ders Joel’s pants­less dance par­ty more adorable than tit­il­lat­ing, but a shot through the win­dows of his par­ents’ house still casts our atten­tion as some shame­less voyeurism. Even as it made him a mega-star, Risky Busi­ness raised an eye­brow at the appeal of the MTV-era mat­inée idols Cruise would come to define.

For the rest of the 1980s, Hollywood’s biggest earn­er fleshed out his gold­en boy per­sona in Amer­i­cana main­stays like All The Right Moves and Top Gun. For Pete Mav­er­ick” Mitchell, Cruise trans­lat­ed Joel Goodsen’s naivety into a cal­low self-assur­ance that, when set against the shim­mer­ing speed of the F‑14 Tom­cat, became a glam­orous sym­bol of insou­ciant Amer­i­can war­mon­ger­ing. Or so said Oliv­er Stone, with whom Cruise made his last movie of the decade, the anti-war dra­ma Born on the Fourth of July.

Cruise was an unlike­ly choice for the role of Ron Kovic, a Viet­nam vet who became an out­spo­ken decrier of U.S. inter­ven­tion­ism after being par­a­lyzed over­seas. Crit­ics saw the actor’s phys­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion from clean-cut cadet into shag­gy resis­tor as a major, though wel­come, depar­ture. But the performance’s wal­lop is in the famil­iar­i­ty of Maverick’s inso­lent face on a furi­ous, fran­gi­ble body. When, briefly cleaned up in Kovic’s crisp Marine blues, Cruise flinch­es at an Inde­pen­dence Day parade’s every fire­crack­er, the wince reg­is­ters not as a retreat from his ear­li­er work, but a reflec­tion on it.

There are shades of this reflex­iv­i­ty in 1996’s Jer­ry Maguire, the fairy­tale of a slick sell-out cured by Cameron Crowe’s hip­pie speed­ball style blend of man­ic sin­cer­i­ty. But Cruise’s pen­chant for roles trou­bled by Tom Cruise” tru­ly peaked in 1999, when he gave him­self over to Stan­ley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Ander­son for back-to-back vivi­sec­tions. Both Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Anderson’s mag­nif­i­cent Mag­no­lia cut through the lay­ers of Cruise’s star per­sona to expose the nervi­er things that lie beneath it. As chau­vin­ist pick-up artist Frank TJ Mack­ey and the solip­sis­tic Dr. Bill Hart­ford, Cruise’s trade­mark cock­i­ness becomes a hol­low front for des­per­ate inse­cu­ri­ty. His mas­culin­i­ty hinges on a sequence of lies. His author­i­ty evap­o­rates in rooms full of strangers who look to him for expla­na­tions only to get back­flips, or bad orgy eti­quette, in reply.

Then, in the mid-2000s, Cruise began run­ning, lit­er­al­ly, in the oppo­site direc­tion. Abrupt­ly an action star, and only a bit less abrupt­ly a zeal­ous PR night­mare, he seemed more inter­est­ed in armor­ing his mythos than fur­ther explor­ing it. Still, for all their navel-gaz­ing glo­ry, a deep vein of anx­i­ety runs through Top Gun: Mav­er­ick and the lat­est entries in the Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble fran­chise. The extreme stunts for which Cruise has now become noto­ri­ous trade on the dual idea that he is both the only one who can exe­cute them and that, some­day soon­er than we’d like, he won’t be able to. It’s a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty reach­ing back to his Risky Busi­ness days that is made most vis­i­ble when Tom Cruise hurls his body off a cliff in IMAX 3‑D. If there’s only one star like him, the long arc of his unique­ly self-aware career seems to ask, does it mean he’s infal­li­ble or always already falling?

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