JERRY MAGUIRE
Written and Directed
by Cameron Crowe; Produced by James L. Brooks, Richard Sakai and Laurence
Mark; starring Tom Cruise, Renee Zellweger, Cuba Gooding Jr., Kelly Preston,
Jerry O’Connell, Jay Mohr and Bonnie Hunt.
Trap: "It’s not whether
you win or lose, but how you play the game." How many times did your
high school gym teacher tell you that, only to growl Vince Lombardi’s immortal
"Winning isn’t the best thing – it’s the ONLY thing," when the
other team wiped the field with you?
Bluesy:
How many times did your high school gym teacher look like Tom Cruise is
a better question. Let’s face it, all rules go out the window when a gal
has something like that to look at for 135 minutes.. Sure, he isn’t perfect
looking; because that, after all, isn’t what’s so appealing about him.
It’s his smile, his eyes, his slightly crooked nose, those biceps (his
gym work certainly pays off). He acts like a charismatic guy who easily
runs over women’s hearts and doesn’t look back at the skid marks. Self-absorbed,
afraid of committing to one girl… because, after all, good looking women
are in no short supply to him. Whether this is true or not of Tom Cruise,
the person, I can’t say. But in Jerry Maguire, he is certainly playing
into type.
Trap: The
type of character he seems almost genetically engineered to play, it would
seem – the glib hotshot that women swoon over the minute he flashes his
trademark boyish grin. He certainly runs true to form here, playing a high-powered
sports agent who one day suffers a crisis of conscience and writes a memo
entitled "The Things We Think, but Do Not Say" suggesting that
his firm take on fewer clients and take more time with the ones they have.
In short order, he’s fired, his clients desert him, and he breaks up with
his upwardly-mobile yuppie fiancee (Preston). He strikes out on his own,
with only one loyal client, an ambitious but underrated football player
(Gooding), and an idealistic young single mother (Zellweger) from his former
agency’s accounting department who signs on as his long-suffering girl
Friday and eventual love interest. He soon finds out that it’s harder to
walk the walk than it is to talk the talk, particularly when he tries to
apply his new-found ideals to his personal life.
Bluesy: The
problem is, he doesn’t really apply his ideals to his personal life. He’s
the same guy, just with less cash and less Armani. Zellweger’s character
is a total dishrag throughout the film, proclaiming her love for him after
sleeping with him and continuing to remind him that she’s doing all of
this because of the memo he wrote (ahem, yeah right). She treats him like
a total God, just because of those biceps (which could keep a girls attention
for a while, I’ll give you that)… but he never once reciprocates, treating
her anything other than a perpetual ego pumper. She’s a true, blue "stand
by your man" sorta gal… but she doesn’t come across as witty, sexy
or charismatic in any way . Though she starts off the film as an accountant,
she seems to leave that to answer and patch through phone calls for him.
She gives up any semblance of a life for him to basically play Mommy to
both him and her little boy. When pressed to give her a compliment, the
best he can think of is "she’s loyal," and he’s right.
Like PRETTY WOMAN,
Cinderella apparently gets her "prince charming;" however, at
least Julia Roberts got to spit gum, shock the tourists and have a shot
at going back to school. Why are these people right for each other anyway?
I mean, other than the glitz of the sports milieu, this is a film about
relationships. After I came out of the theatre, I got to thinking maybe
somebody wrote Cameron Crowe a memo saying something about "Family
Values" in it. What do you think, Trap?
Trap: I don’t know about family values – it’s
the film’s dramatic ones I had problems with -- specifically the way the
Zellweger character’s point of view winds up being pretty much the viewpoint
of the film as a whole. At one point she confesses to her sister (Hunt,
playing the Rosalind Russell role) that she "loves him for the man
he almost is" -- a great line that the film never quite manages to
live up to. Likewise, though I found the movie at times enjoyable, I found
myself liking it more for the movie it could have been, rather than the
one it actually was. At times I was reminded of some of Preston Sturges’
great screwball comedies, like THE GREAT McGINTY
or SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS,
films where some hapless chump takes the American Way of Life at its face
value and tries to live according to its ideals, only to get chewed up
and spit out by the American Way of Life as it’s actually lived. Although
Crowe has shown a talent for deft characterization and a sympathetic eye
for the absurdities of modern life his previous films, SAY
ANYTHING and SINGLES, he lacks Sturges’ merciless
wit, and so JERRY MAGUIRE
too often comes off as not only soft-hearted (excusable in a romantic comedy),
but soft-headed (inexcusable at any time).
Bluesy: I don’t know if it reminded me of
a screwball comedy… in fact, I wish it did. In those, the heroine usually
has a lot going for her. Cruise, however, was rather funny… and really
quite sympathetic in a few early scenes when he’s on the outs with the
company. If only Zellweger’s character could match him, or at least carry
her own weight, I really think I would’ve loved this film (the scene where
Zellweger is given her one good line "It used to be first class meant
a better meal. Now it means a better life," was really never repeated
in the rest of the film). As it stands, it was a diverting fantasy, easy
on a gal’s eyes, some funny moments, but ultimately, without much substance.
Trap: But at least – unlike high school gym
class – I didn’t leave with any bruises.
Bluesy: Oh yeah, did I tell you, I’ve taken
up kick boxing?
Trap: Uh-oh.
