“Jerry Maguire” (1996)
Cruise may have given better acting performances, but he’s never shone as much as a movie star as he did in his first collaboration with Cameron Crowe, “Jerry Maguire.” It doesn’t get the best rep now, thanks to the cultural penetration of its catchphrases (“Show me the money,” “You complete me,” etc.) and its omnipresence on TV, but rewatching it, it’s still a great film, and Cruise is as terrific as he’s ever been (and deservedly picked up an Oscar nomination for his trouble). The part was allegedly written for Tom Hanks, but it’s impossible to imagine anyone except Cruise; his yuppie charisma is perfect for the role from the start, keeping Maguire from feeling like too much of a dick, and you buy every second of his moral awakening. But there’s also a big hint of crazy in the character (something we’ve seen far too much of from the star in recent years); when Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Rod Tidwell tells him “You are hanging on by a very thin thread,” you wouldn’t disagree. Aside from Cruise, the movie still vies with “Almost Famous” for Crowe’s best, Gooding Jr. and Renee Zellwegger have never been better, and the soundtrack’s pretty great too (forget the CD release, the choice cuts, from the likes of The Replacements and Gram Parsons, weren’t on it).
“Magnolia” (1999)
The end of the last century saw Cruise really chase after acting glory with two potentially controversial, sexually-charged roles. One was with one of cinema’s most-acclaimed auteurs, Stanley Kubrick, in what sadly turned out to be the director’s final film. The other was with a new kid on the block: Paul Thomas Anderson, who’d broken out two years earlier with the outstanding “Boogie Nights.” Among Anderson’s Altman-esque tapestry of LA lives drawn together by happenstance, Cruise was the biggest star by far, but it’s a testament to his skills (and the director’s canny use of his star power in the casting) that Cruise more than holds his own in an ensemble that includes Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly and many more. The star plays Frank T.J. Mackey, a Neil Strauss-like self-help speaker coaching men on how to (in his words) “tame the cunt,” who’s also the estranged son of dying T.V. producer Earl Partridge (Jason Robards). His monologue to an adoring crowd is a show-stopper (it’s hard not to see the DNA of the performance in the recent “Rock of Ages“), but we also see the wounded boy ditched by an unloving father years ago, in an emotional final scene that still marks Cruise’s finest piece of screen acting. It’s a testament to the collaboration that, despite Anderson’s latest film riffing on Scientology, the director and star seemingly remain friends.