Early on in “Holy Smoke,” her latest, darkest foray into the battle of the sexes, director Jane Campion brings us to a quiet street in the Sydney suburb of Sans Souci. The houses there are indistinguishable — low-level designs tucked behind square patches of lawn — but one house sticks out. Outside it is a large sign advertising pet grooming and veterinary services; inside poodles scurry around and animals caterwaul in the background.
But it’s the human members of this particular household who seem most out of place: Miriam Barron (Julie Hamilton), the doughy, befuddled matriarch; her husband, the bikini-clad Gilbert (Tim Robertson); the gay older son Tim (Paul Goddard); the floozy sister-in-law Yvonne (Sophie Lee), and of course the faithful family friend — a man whose long blonde tresses and thick muscles have earned him the nickname Fabio (Simon Anderson).
Watching this crew of oddballs and eccentrics assemble, we laugh. They have gathered to bring the youngest sibling, Ruth (Kate Winslet), back from India, where she’s fallen in with a religious cult, and place her in the hands of cult deprogrammer P.J. Waters (Harvey Keitel) — but it’s pretty clear that these folks would have difficulty getting off a bus, much less extricating a loved one from a cult. But then the tone shifts. Miriam travels to India to bring Ruth home, and just as she’s about to enter an assemblage hosted by Ruth’s cult leader, she panics and runs away.
Chirping children trying to sell Miriam trinkets run alongside her; she loses her shoes; she makes a desperate but failed attempt to find her asthma inhaler; eventually she passes out. And through all of this we come to feel the stinging anxiety of a woman faced with the possibility of losing her daughter forever. Later, the men in the film get their dramatic due as well — particularly when they form a human circle around Ruth (now back in Australia) and force her to submit to P.J. Here, Campion mixes up close-ups and overhead shots — and in both the glimpses of the men’s determined faces, and in the forceful physicality of the camera work, she shows us depths of seriousness and violence we never would have anticipated.
For many viewers and critics all of this is going to be too much; some reviews of “Holy Smoke” have argued that its over-the-top humor and unsteady tone constitute nothing more than an unholy mess. But others, I hope, are going to lock into the unevenness, and possibly even be reminded of two other, equally all-over-the-place, equally triumphant recent works — Sam Mendes and Alan Ball’s “American Beauty” and Todd Solondz’s “Happiness.” What these three films have in common is not only that each is engaging with comedy’s ability to make us laugh at people and with them; it’s also that they are doing so in a way that is consciously in disarray, consciously uneven.
In “American Beauty,” we see this in the treatment of Annette Bening’s Carolyn — a woman who begins as a vile Martha Stewart-gone-mad suburban career mom, but who ends, clutching her dead husband’s clothing, as a tragic portrait of self-hatred. In “Happiness” we see it in the scene-to-scene (sometimes shot-to-shot) switches from contempt (a psychiatrist falls asleep listening to his patient), to bemusement (a housewife brags about having it all while her husband is off masturbating to teen heartthrob magazines), to screwy empathy (as when that husband confesses his pedophilic crimes to his son).
Indeed, in any one of these films we might watch one scene played as screwball farce, the next played as high drama and the next as overwrought camp. Yet in the end we come upon startlingly coherent, overwhelmingly moving visions of modern culture, ones deeply attuned to the fractured, rapid-fire manner in which life in the new media age is so often lived and experienced.
Defining a new kind of comedy, of course, is a dicey game, so I won’t go any further without attempting to distinguish these three films from works that have come before them, namely the “black comedies” they seem most explicitly to draw from. To be sure, there are long traditions of screwball comedies of humiliation (from the silent-era farces of Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton to modern classics like “There’s Something About Mary”), gallows satires (see the works of Robert Altman or Luis Buquel), and hipster exercises in irony (Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers). But none of these comparisons completely work for me — and the difference has everything to do with tone.
A film like the Coens’ “Fargo” or Buquel’s “Belle de Jour,” for instance, establishes its tone of glib distance early on, and sustains it — coolly, often hilariously — to the end. But Mendes, Campion and Solondz do something different. In fact, they do everything different. There are never more than two or three consecutive scenes of tonal consistency. We might get a mean-spirited joke (Jon Lovitz’s suicide in “Happiness,” which inspires his co-workers to ask one another, “Which one was he?”) followed by a cartoon love scene (Bening fucking “The King” Peter Gallagher in “American Beauty”) and then a bizarre and disturbing narrative non sequitur (as when the family visits a disco to celebrate Ruth’s deprogramming in “Holy Smoke”).
In each of these films the makers juxtapose absurdity and gravity, and mix up their essentially realist visions with sequences that seem piped in from another planet. The end result, as in such unsettling classics as “M*A*S*H” or “Viridiana” or “Stranger Than Paradise,” is completely alive to the unsteady, exciting range of emotions that comedy can produce. But like no filmmakers before them, Campion, Mendes and Solondz have sought out an aesthetic to match that unevenness. They’ve turned the quality of being out of control into their triumphant virtue.
Yet I don’t want to suggest that the comedy in these films has come out of the blue — or that it can’t be understood as building upon other comic traditions. To that end, it’s interesting to note that the portraits of family in “Holy Smoke,” “American Beauty” and “Happiness” have their roots in television sitcoms. Take, for instance, the scene in “Happiness” in which Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) discusses the future with her sister Joy (Jane Adams). As Campion does in “Holy Smoke,” Solondz introduces these characters as cartoon extremes — the too-happy house mom versus the lugubrious, mousy folk singer.
But Solondz’s strategy differs from Campion’s in that he pushes these extremes as far as he can — and in doing so generates all the scene’s nervous tension. Trish tells Joy that she’s worried about her; Joy says she plans to get a new job and move out of their parents’ house soon. To which Trish responds with pure passive-aggressive venom, chirpily telling her, “I always thought that you would never amount to much, that you would end up alone … But now I see that’s not true. There’s a glimmer of hope for you after all.”
How do we react to this scene? Probably with both laughter and revulsion — as we try to figure out if we’re watching a winking burlesque of supportive sisterhood or the most mean-spirited take on sibling rivalry ever seen. The point, of course, is that it’s both, and that for Solondz family interactions can only be expressed in such a schizoid manner. But it’s in this respect, I think, that “Happiness” could easily be described as a kind of sitcom of the outri — because essentially we’re seeing the banal television conflicts of families, friends and lovers being played out in increasingly twisted ways. Imagine it as a hyper-real, hyper-nasty episode of “Seinfeld.” Imagine it, in fact, as the episode in which Jerry comes to terms with his predilection for girls one-third his age.
And imagine “Holy Smoke” or “American Beauty” in the same way: the former, with its cast of oddballs fluttering around two individuals engaged in an epic sexual grudge match, could be seen as an alternative to “Cheers” or “Mad About You,” just as the latter, with its indelible portrait of one weird suburban street, might be a variation on “All in the Family” or “Married With Children.”
Each of these films seems to acknowledge that sitcoms understand the broadness, randomness and sheer goofiness of modern life better than anything else out there: the way the modern workplace has come to approximate, and sometimes supplant, the family unit (“Just Shoot Me,” “Sports Night”); the way race, sexuality and class all bump together incongruously in the cities and suburbs (“Ellen,” “Married With Children”); the way a family can seem to fracture and fragment and yet continue functioning (“Roseanne,” “Everybody Loves Raymond”).
“Holy Smoke,” “American Beauty” and “Happiness” incorporate all these themes, while pushing them farther than even current TV can. They free the sitcom emotions from the constraints of the 22-minute format and the propriety of network standards and practices. We end up with a new kind of sitcom — one played out as messy, turbulent, distinctly R-rated real-life drama.
Take, for instance, the portraits of homosexuality in “Holy Smoke” and “American Beauty” — essentially comic portraits that are nonetheless laced with paranoia and fear. Jim and Jim (Sam Robards and Scott Bakula) in “American Beauty” are terminally happy, fresh-pasta-eating exercise junkies; Tim and Yani (George Mangos) in “Holy Smoke” strut around in chaps and skintight, see-through shirts. At first, these stereotypes seem playful — not unlike the outlandish, self-deprecating humor on a sitcom like “Will & Grace.” But whereas sitcoms trip over themselves in the rush to outdo one joke with the next one, these films are more interested in lingering on the tension or anxiety that produced that joke.
“American Beauty” serves up a throwaway gay-basher joke (“What is this, the gay pride parade?” Chris Cooper’s marine asks upon seeing the gay men jogging); “Holy Smoke,” a kooky-creepy gay kitsch image (the two bare-chested men playing cowboy games with their nephew). In both cases, our laughter rapidly turns sour. We can’t quite figure out if the filmmakers are indicting homophobia or endorsing it — and we’re probably not supposed to. Instead, we’re left with a strangely accurate vision of the way homosexuality operates in contemporary mainstream culture — it is partly tolerated, partly ignored, partly derided.
It seems to me these filmmakers are trying to explore the divided emotions of a society being increasingly (and ever more rapidly) pulled in a multitude of different directions. But it’s here, too, that we can distinguish these works from any number of other wildly inventive, off-kilter recent works, such as “Being John Malkovich,” “Magnolia” or “Titus.” These latter films possess much of the same freewheeling spirit as “Holy Smoke,” “American Beauty” or “Happiness.” But their outlandishness is never quite reined in. (Indeed, in “Magnolia’s” plague-of-frogs sequence, the outlandishness is cast so far out that it’s virtually impossible to know how to respond.) As filmmakers, too, Spike Jonze, Paul Thomas Anderson and Julie Taymor are looking outward — toward new technology (“Malkovich”), fate (“Magnolia”) or the nature of performance (“Titus”).
But in the final moments of “Happiness,” when the child-molesting psychiatrist frankly discusses his aberration with his pubescent son, and “American Beauty,” when Kevin Spacey’s Lester, having just found a way out of his midlife crisis, is murdered, the irony and invention give way to tragic, deeply personal emotions. In “Holy Smoke” this also happens, although with an important difference. Campion’s film makes something clear that may be harder to see in the two other works — her playfulness and abrupt shifts in tone have actually made the emotional release possible. In all three films the seemingly scattershot narrative approaches have yielded an understanding of modern life steeped in truthfulness and intimacy.
In the final 30 minutes of “Holy Smoke,” Campion brings all the irony and weirdness into confluence with a deeply sincere emotional agenda — which is to show human desire at its most frayed and desperate, and to show a younger woman and older man enabling each other to grow more mature and wise. At this point in the film, P.J. has broken the cardinal rule of deprogramming — he’s had sex with his case subject. He and Ruth are at a crossroads: Ruth’s family is beginning to get wise to the affair; Waters’ wife has shown up on the scene; and yet the two of them need to sort through their emotions before they can move on.
So begins a stark, dazzling pas de deux: Ruth dresses P.J. as a woman, making him up with a red dress and matching lipstick; P.J. writes the words “BE KIND” on Ruth’s forehead. She cries; he consoles her. One minute Ruth is in complete control of the situation; in the next P.J. delicately toys with her feelings. Back and forth it goes, with Campion paying precise attention to every subtle shift in the balance of power. And as the situation progresses into ever more bizarre territory — including a desert chase, P.J. resorting to violence and Ruth even getting locked in his car trunk — we continue to laugh.
Yet, at this point, it’s an almost dizzyingly complicated laughter. Partly, we’re relieved after the anxiety of such an intimately wrought sequence. Partly, we view these people with horrified recognition, as they flail, desperate and grotesque, like ourselves in our most vulnerable moments. And partly we just laugh at the farcical, delicious silliness of the situation. The point for Campion, perhaps, is that you can’t have one kind of laughter without the other, that it’s all part of the rich and schizophrenic stew that is turn-of-the-century life. Her great achievement in “Holy Smoke” is to express the world as most of us feel it — as flashing moments of comedy and drama, fear and comfort, hostility and empathy, and irony and sincerity, all linking together in a not-quite-coherent whole.
Do these films point in a direction where other filmmakers will want to go? This question is unanswerable for now. There certainly have been other glimpses of new humor — in the acid-tongued narration of Don Roos’ “The Opposite of Sex,” in the flights of violent fantasy in David Fincher’s “Fight Club,” in the high octane war-adventure antics of David O. Russell’s “Three Kings.” But whether other filmmakers will follow these leads — and whether they will display the kind of control and authority Campion, Mendes and Solondz show — is anyone’s guess.
Yet a few things do remain certain. Love them or hate them, we have before us three of the most audacious movies of the 1990s; these filmmakers are seeking daring new aesthetic approaches to a new millennium. Perhaps the real question, then, is not whether there will be more such works, but whether audiences are ready for them. Or, to quote Yvonne of “Holy Smoke,” just before she goes down on P.J. one lonely night in the desert: “Do you have a Web site?”
One of the earliest and most trenchant intimations I had of my own homosexuality came while watching Tom Cruise in the 1983 comedy “Risky Business.” I say this with a certain amount of embarrassment — because who, after all, wants to admit to being aroused, as a 10-year-old boy, at the sight of a barely-post-pubescent-himself movie star dancing in his snug white cotton underwear? Indeed, I’m not sure I should be mentioning this at all, for fear that I’ll undermine what I really want to say about Cruise, about how original and daring an actor I think he’s become.
But the problem is that I can’t seem to say the one thing without saying the other. My admiration for him as a performer is entirely bound up in my desire for him as a sexual persona. In fact, I don’t think Cruise can separate these elements either; whether he realizes it or not, he’s grown as an actor by exploiting the very things — a classic face, a perfect body, a predilection toward sexually ambiguous parts — that have also made him a gay icon. Is it any wonder, then, that in our impaired film culture, in which male sexuality is rarely addressed on-screen, and even more rarely addressed in film criticism, Cruise has had such a hard time gaining widespread respect? Or, to put it another way: Whether you’re gay or straight, until you allow yourself to be turned on by Tom Cruise, you can’t begin to see how very far he’s come. (I hope, and expect, this progression will continue with his much-speculated-upon performance in the soon-to-be-released “Eyes Wide Shut,” co-starring Cruise’s wife, Nicole Kidman, and directed by Stanley Kubrick.)
I can already hear the objections: from the one group of moviegoers cemented in their belief that Cruise will never be anything more than a transparent pretty boy, and from the other that will disapprovingly sneer, “When are you people going to give up? He’s not gay.” The former objections I will address in due time, but to those who would argue the latter, let me state this right away: I don’t care whether any of the rumors that have dogged Cruise from virtually the start of his career are true or not. It doesn’t matter to me. What does interest me are the rumors themselves, because in many ways they are a necessary starting point for a critical analysis of the actor’s work. Cruise has repeatedly — and vehemently — denied these rumors, including taking successful legal action against a London newspaper that called his marriage to Nicole Kidman a put-on. But still they persist — to the point where one wonders if the actor’s work isn’t feeding them. Has Cruise (consciously or unconsciously) been telegraphing gay signals that audiences (consciously or unconsciously) have been picking up on?
A scene in “Losin’ It” (1983), a crass teen comedy in which Cruise plays one of three California high school students who head to Tijuana to get laid, certainly suggests that there’s something more sexually complicated about him than anyone has ever acknowledged. Taken “upstairs” at a strip club, Cruise is led into a room of prostitutes where his buddies give him first choice. His gait hesitant, his hands lodged in the pockets of his pants, his face sweetly telegraphing the panic of a confident young man gradually losing his cool, he selects a much older woman. But the desire soon caves in on itself. Alone with the prostitute, he realizes that he won’t be able to perform — and he captures a quiet, lingering moment of sexual dejection.
Tom Cruise has played the role of confident, cocksure stud so many times — and so effectively — that most viewers tend to forget how many moments there are just like this one in the Cruise canon. In “Risky Business,” for instance, Cruise imagines himself home alone with his high school dream girl — the music swells, their shirts come off, they begin making out. And then sirens, flashing lights and a curious mob of neighbors outside interrupt them. The next shot is of Cruise lying in bed, with a sheet covering his lower body and his hand beneath that sheet. The joke is that this is a masturbatory fantasy gone awry — and yet Cruise doesn’t play it for laughs. When he bounds out of the bed and begins looking through an alternative newspaper for a prostitute — first enraged, and then sad and awkwardly tensed up — he limns a genuinely moving portrait of a young boy frustrated by how long it’s taking for him to become a man.
Yet, I’m not trying to suggest anything so banal as Cruise’s heterosexual failings in “Losin’ It” or “Risky Business” being symbolic of a latent homosexuality, in either the characters or the actor. (He does, after all, successfully lose his virginity in both of these films.) Instead, I think these moments convey something far more difficult — a state of almost constant sexual vulnerability. Few of Cruise’s talented contemporaries right now — not Denzel Washington, Tim Robbins, or even the swaggering Vince Vaughn or the sublimely vapid Keanu Reeves — are uninhibited enough to convey real sexual impulses on screen. The one or two who can, say Nicolas Cage or Sean Penn, do so through macho ferality — Penn violently finishing himself off in the woods after a tryst with Jennifer Lopez in “U-Turn,” or Cage lecherously placing his hand between Laura Dern’s legs as he follows her up the steps in “Wild at Heart.”
But when it comes to deeply lived-in portraits of human sexuality, Cruise is the most original talent we have — particularly in the way he so readily establishes his characters through heterosexual posturing and then strips away the layers of control. Watch the scene in Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989) where Cruise, playing all-American jock turned paralyzed Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, lies beneath a Mexican prostitute. As she writhes atop him, moaning and kissing him, Cruise begins to shake with tears, slowly at first, but then almost violently — his character exhausted by an inability to feel anything below the waist, and yet still seeking some way back to masculinity. Here, and in so many other moments throughout his career, Cruise is unafraid to portray a man completely overwhelmed by his own sexuality. He can’t do it, but he can’t not try to do it, either — and within that contradiction he finds a fragility that is deeply resonant. And it’s here, too, that I think we locate one of the primary sources of a gay audience’s identification with him — as a man who can never divorce sexuality from self-consciousness.
In “Born on the Fourth of July” he’s playing a literal version of a common gay state of mind — the man paralyzed by sex. “Risky Business” and “Losin’ It” offer something similar — unable to control his impulses, and yet completely terrified to act upon them, he’s acting out emotions that just about every gay person has experienced firsthand. In these films (and in many others) he may be playing straight characters, but through his confusion, desperation, all-consuming need and occasional self-hatred, he winds up offering the closest thing we have to a homosexual sensibility in movies today.
There is, however, another important part of Cruise’s pull on gay audiences: the homoeroticism. At times, of course, his films have seemed like the worst sort of gay kitsch. “Top Gun” (1986), for instance, features so many rapt shots of towel-and-underwear-clad men lingering in locker rooms that it inspired Quentin Tarantino’s gay interpretation in the film “Sleep With Me.” (“Ice comes up to Maverick, and he says, ‘Man, you can ride my tail anytime!’ And what does Maverick say? ‘You can ride mine!’”) And then there is “Interview with the Vampire” (1994), featuring a blond-tressed Cruise joining with Brad Pitt to act out a bitchy Leopold and Loeb-style marriage in which every bloodsucking murder becomes a tableau of orgiastic ecstasy.
But there is more to this than a few Rock Hudson-style double entendres and gay camp moments; and to understand how deep Cruise’s homoeroticism goes, we need to pay attention to the Cruise image, to the body and face and how he uses them on-screen. Indeed, however attractive you do or do not find him, one thing is certain — the camera utterly adores him. Part of this, I think, is because his boy-next-door features — the high, even-tempered cheekbones, the just-too-big nose, the sparkling blue eyes — relax on screen instead of tensing up (see Scott Wolf or Freddie Prinze Jr., two current neo-Cruise boy stars), and so he draws you in, even when his face isn’t being terribly expressive.
And then there is the smile — the big, toothy, preternaturally bright smile that, in its ubiquity, truly seems to beckon to a homosexual audience. Indeed, the fact that it is a “heterosexual” smile may very well be at the heart of Cruise’s gay appeal — which is to say, the more that smile gleams at us, the more its possessor comes to embody an entire spectrum of homosexual desire and fantasy: from the forbidden older brother protector (“All the Right Moves”), to the dangerous carnal predator (“Cocktail,” “Interview With the Vampire”), to the straight-boy dreamboat who just might be willing to entertain sexual alternatives (“Top Gun,” “Jerry Maguire”). Cruise uses his body in much the same manner — as a fundamentally ordinary entity that has astonishing erotic range.
We first got a good look at that body in the opening scene of “All the Right Moves” (1983), a clumsy, touching melodrama about a Pittsburgh teenager trying to secure a football scholarship. Clad (once again) only in his underwear, Cruise gets out of bed and does a set of start-the-day pushups — and it’s immediately apparent that although he’s supposed to be a playing a football player, his body looks a lot more like a swimmer’s: lithe, muscular, perfectly smooth. Indeed, there’s something terribly prissy about Tom Cruise’s body — as if he spends too much time working on it, trying to make it look perfect. In lesser hands (Rob Lowe’s, say, or Emilio Estevez’s) such a scene might easily have degenerated into self-parody — the smoothed-out, muscled-up gay porn cover boy playing to the mainstream crowd, but Cruise made it work. And I think that’s because he can use his body so fluidly — and so ambiguously.
Take, for instance, the underwear dance in “Risky Business.” Cruise bounces around the room, half lost to the music (Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll”), half self-conscious of his own outri exhibitionism. When he concludes by plopping onto the couch and throwing his body into a quivering frenzy, he manages the near impossible feat of making narcissism extremely sexy. In “The Color of Money” (1986), he does an even more glorious dance, this time at a pool hall to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.” Cruise shuffles forward and back, eyeing the pool table and taking one perfect shot after another, slicing his cue stick through the air to the beat of the music — until he stops, ostentatiously runs his hand over his impeccably coifed pompadour and repeats the lyrics of the song, ” … and his hair was perfect.” If Tom Cruise had never done anything else in film, those two sequences alone might have made him a gay icon — because in both he gives gay viewers their ultimate movie star: someone half-repugnant, but still magnetic; the perfect embodiment of heterosexual desire, when he isn’t acting so gay.
So why has Cruise had such a hard time gaining critical respect? Granted, those early performances aren’t so much the product of a good actor as a promising talent; in Ridley Scott’s “Legend” (1985) and Brian DePalma’s “Mission Impossible” (1996) he is kept reined in by a director determined to be the star; and in Ron Howard’s “Far and Away” (1992) he is flat-out awful. But just at the point when Cruise gave his first completely fleshed-out adult performance in “Born on the Fourth of July,” he seemed to be written off for good. “Cruise has the right All-American boy look for his role here, but you wait for something to emerge and realize the look goes all the way through. He has a little boy voice and no depth of emotion,” Pauline Kael wrote at the time, pointedly summing up the criticisms that have stuck with him perhaps even more insistently than the gay rumors.
Again, maybe it takes a gay perspective to be able to see his career in the fuller light in which it demands to be viewed. His work can be divided into three distinct sections: the losing-his-virginity period (“Losin’ It,” “All the Right Moves,” “Risky Business”), the cocksure-stud-learning-about-the-world middle period (“Top Gun,” “The Color of Money,” “Cocktail,” “Rain Man”) and the grown-up man wrestling with impotency period (“Born on the Fourth of July,” “The Firm,” “Interview With the Vampire,” “Jerry Maguire”). And when considered together, these three sections make for a completely original whole — a chronicle of one man’s sexual life journey, a multifaceted portrait of innocence and corruption, assuredness and dysfunction, the ordinary and the taboo. But few viewers can acknowledge even this considerable achievement, because they can’t see Cruise as having made any progress at all; for them, he will forever be remembered for the posturing and mugging of his middle period.
To some extent, I agree. There isn’t much depth of emotion to Cruise in “Cocktail” or “Days of Thunder.” But those performances still seem right to me — and though I know it’s a dicey game to praise shallow acting by saying that an actor is playing a shallow role, Cruise has made the shallowness an essential part of his journey. His performance in “Jerry Maguire” (1996) is his first great one precisely because he’s playing off the shallowness, and using it to throw his audience off guard. In that film, he plays a vapid man — a sports agent with a hot-to-trot fiancie and an expensive car — who experiences a moment of gravity. His actions in that moment cost him his job, and send him on a new life path. The twist is that he spends the rest of the film trying to convince himself that he hasn’t made a mistake.
The joy of “Jerry Maguire” is that it becomes a summation of everything Cruise has done so far — a film about a young man inching toward sexual and emotional self-definition. The great triumph of Cruise’s performance is in his subtle acknowledgment that self-definition may never come — that it may be more than any American adult male living at the end of the 20th century has any right to expect or ask for. My single favorite moment in the film has nothing to do with sex, but in a way it expresses the ultimate Tom Cruise-ian sexual state. It finds the actor driving alone in his car, returning from what he thinks has been a successful business meeting. High on the moment, he wants to sing, but he can’t find the right song on the radio — until he comes upon Tom Petty’s “Free Falling.” That the lyrics of this song — “and I’m free, free falling” — are not quite appropriate for a man trying to avoid free fall himself occurs to Cruise in a flash, but he squelches such bad thoughts and keeps singing, laughing, trying to generate for himself a moment of good will and hopefulness. In other words, as a man (and as an actor) he’s learning that adulthood is all about playing through your vulnerabilities.
All of which brings us to “Eyes Wide Shut,” his three-years-in-the-making collaboration with Nicole Kidman and director Stanley Kubrick. The film is purported to be a psychological thriller about the sexual obsessions and fantasies of a married couple in New York City. Not surprisingly, the first images shown of the film were explicitly erotic ones: a 90-second clip shown to exhibitors in the spring, in which Cruise stands with Kidman naked before a mirror, kissing and fondling her to the insistently nervy beat of Chris Isaak’s “Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing”; and a 30-second trailer, in which this kissing scene is intercut with other shots of Cruise and Kidman attending a swank social event. It’s impossible to know what’s going on in either of these clips, but credit Cruise with at least this much: He’s generated a mountain of hype by keeping audiences guessing about how twisted his next set of sexual adventures will be.
And credit him with a certain amount of bravery: It’s clear that Cruise is putting his neck out farther than ever before. He’s also opening himself to a whole new round of questions about his marriage and his sexuality — and this time, if the film is as explicit as it’s said to be, he may even have to answer them. Can he pull it off — the big role in the last movie by the great director? I have some doubts. Having watched him and liked him for so many years, I don’t want to see him stumble, and certainly not on such a grand scale. Then again, Cruise probably isn’t too concerned himself. He’s dared to take sexual leaps forward before, without knowing where he was going to land. And it’s probably the ultimate testament to his maturation as an actor that — if the odd, disturbing images of his naked groping with Kidman are any indication at all — this time he’s working without a net.
