Los Angeles Magazine: Under control: ambitious, obsessive, talented

THERE'S A SCENE IN EDWARD ZWlCK'S The Last Samurai that says less about the movie than about its star. Tom Cruise is an American army captain in Japan in the mid 1870s who's been taken captive by samurai; toe-to-toe in the rain with one of the warriors, he keeps getting the crap beaten out of him. Stubbornly, undauntedly, Cruise picks himself up out of the mud only to be knocked down again. It's a crucial scene in the film even as it's at odds with everything we know about the character. It's also an emblematic scene in the career of Cruise the actor, indicative of a relentless drive and a sense of embattlement, even as that career has yet to take a glancing blow in two decades.

No character Tom Cruise has played is quite the piece of work that he himself seems to be. Before acting, he had ambitions to be a priest, attending seminary school as a teenager following a childhood that uprooted him so often it can't really be said he was rooted at all. Biographies of Cruise talk about the time he spent in New York busing tables; in fact this tortured dues-paying lasted a matter of months. His first movie, Endless Love, was in theaters by the time he was 19. Two years later he was starring in the popular Risky Business; with Top Gun he was one of the biggest stars in the world by the age of 24. Most actors would consider this something less than a long, hard slog. The Hollywood firmament is full of such novas, of course, so the most impressive thing about Cruise is how he's kept on blazing. To anyone who's watched closely; something about him has always suggested an unnatural staying power--some combination of luck and drive and more talent than people acknowledged, not to mention the ridiculous good looks that even straight men find slightly stupefying.

To luck and drive and talent and looks we must add an obsessiveness that almost renders everything else incidental. A 2002 Time magazine piece about the making of Minority Report recounted the filming of a scene in which Cruise's renegade future-cop hides submerged in a bathtub full of water; a single bubble escapes a single nostril, floats to the surface, and gives him away The director, Steven Spielberg, planned to add the bubble with computer-generated imagery. Cruise wouldn't have it. He insisted he would blow the bubble himself. On the one hand, this might be seen as extraordinary professional commitment; on the other hand, maybe it's just nuts. The character in the scene isn't trying to blow the bubble, after all. To the contrary, he's trying not to blow a bubble, or do anything that would give himself away--which is to say; the actor was determined to accomplish for its own sake precisely what the character he plays is desperate to avoid.

If this isn't a moment in the life of a control freak, I don't know what is, and control is the issue with which Cruise's characters most often wrestle. Either they struggle to take charge of their lives and fates in movies like Top Gun, Born on the Fourth of July, and A Few Good Men, or more interestingly, they're learning-usually against their will-to concede control, such as the doctor who wanders a Boschian Manhattan in Eyes Wide Shut or the sexual fascist in Magnolia for whom reconciliation with his dying father means making peace with all the pain and weakness he's spent a lifetime repressing. In the title role of 1996's Jerry Maguire, Cruise's sports agent takes charge of his life only by giving up control of his heart, and in his best early performance--as the greedy; self-absorbed brother of Dustin Hoffman's autistic savant in 1988's Rain Man--he slowly transforms into someone able to accept not only unforeseen emotional bonds but the havoc they wreak. The change is so seamless that you never put your finger on where or when it happens until it already has.

MAYBE BECAUSE so many of Cruise's most memorable characters have been hustlers--from Jerry Maguire to Rain Man's portentously named Charlie Babbitt to Magnolia's Frank T.J. Mackey to the pool shark Vincent in The Color of Money--something about Cruise as an actor seems untrustworthy Does he find these roles or do they find him, drawn to the most irresistible smile Hollywood has seen since Jack Nicholson's, part boyish charm and part canny seduction, with something between the two approximating a leer? Cruise never makes a false move; even those films that aren't hits, such as Eyes Wide Shut or Vanilla Sky, are failures of audacity that only burnish his reputation. His touch is almost a little too unfailing. No one ever says, "What could he have been thinking to want to work with Stanley Kubrick?" With rare exceptions, such as in Minority Report when Cruise collapses in grief before a vision of the life his dead child might have lived, his scenes of emotional intensity still feel more skillful than actually naked. Cruise always comes off as calculating; it's harsh and probably unfair, but sometimes you can't help thinking of him as a Stepford Great Actor. The man who led a nomadic childhood is always sure of his footing. He never really loses himself to a role, to art, or maybe to anything else.

In The Last Samurai he's a hustler, too. Ravaged and haunted by the women and children he's killed in the Indian wars, driven to drink, his Captain Nathan Algren is a living exhibit in a Wild West show until he stumbles into a job that takes him to a Far East hungry for modernization. Commissioned to eradicate the Japanese past and those who represent it, as he did the past of his own country and those who represented it, Algren comes face-to-face with redemption. Cruise has done redemption before, most notably in Jerry Maguire and Born on the Fourth of July; it's a theme that attracts him, either despite or because it challenges his true nature. Perhaps the once-aspiring Catholic priest still believes everyone needs to be redeemed, even as the converted Scientologist never acknowledges what his own redemption might involve. In Top Gun and Cocktail, Cruise so successfully embodied the '80s--a decade that raised narcissism to an ethic--that now the depth of tragedy that intuitively informs most great acting eludes him; in his genuine yearning to find real gravity, in the last ten years, he's also lost the joy of the early films. The goofy abandon of Cruise's dance around the pool table to "Werewolves of London" in The Color of Money has given way to The Last Samurai's stately Kabuki and what is now Cruise's trademark ferocity of focus.

Edward Zwick is an honorable filmmaker, not even remotely a hack, whose movies are clearly labors of love. But there's no craziness in his soul; at best his films win your respect but never transport you. Lima Thurman aside, there may not be another movie star of Cruise's generation who could persuasively pull off The Last Samurai's most heroic moments, as when he single-handedly dispatches three or four enemies in the streets of Tokyo. Once you've taught yourself to blow a solitary bubble out of a solitary nostril, a thousand years of samurai tradition is pretty much a snap. Less convincing is the desperate death wish that drives Cruise's character and motivates The Last Samurai. The self-defilement that characterizes Nathan Algren remains either beyond Cruise's reach or, more likely, his will to reach, not in terms of his command of actorly technique but some inner leap of the psyche that can't be translated by choreography or craft. Tellingly, the most affecting performance in the film finally isn't Cruise's but Ken Watanabe's as samurai lord Katsumoto. To Tom Cruise's credit, over the last ten years he's taken a lot of chances: People forget how bold and controversial it was when he accepted the role of the homoerotic Lestat in Interview with the Vampire. But sooner or later the mark of every great artist is that he risks making a fool of himself, which isn't the same as playing characters who make fools of themselves. An inner chasm divides Cruise's admirable gambling instinct from the dangerous rapture of an actor willing to go someplace from which he can never come back. Cruise is always an actor with a way back, with compasses for eyes and a map in lieu of faith.