Once upon a time, the only thing that calmed my mother down was a Tom Cruise movie. She kept a set in a drawer by the TV—Risky Business, Top Gun, The Color of Money, A Few Good Men, The Firm, Days of Thunder. Cruise’s lifeguard smile and cocky heroics acted on her like a narcotic.
Then the Cruise movies went south. Valkyrie, Knight and Day, Rock of Ages, the Jack Reachers. . . . My mother and stepfather dutifully took themselves to nearly all, but none were added to the home collection. The empty violence of the Reacher movies especially depressed mom, and 2013’s Oblivion left her mystified: “I have no idea what that was about,” she wrote me, plaintively, on the way home from the multiplex.
She skipped The Mummy altogether. Which is a kind of requiem. One among many, it turns out. There’s been plenty of writing about Cruise’s diminishing box office. His narcissistic role choices. His weird insistence on doing his own stunts, even at 55. His weirdness period. America loves a curiosity and Cruise has become Hollywood royalty as sideshow exhibit. The Ageless Hero.
But lo and behold, I’ve just seen a great Tom Cruise movie. Near great. Very, very good. American Made, which opens Friday, is a winningly agile film about a real-life late-1970s TWA pilot turned CIA recruit turned drug smuggler named Barry Seal. Directed with ragtag brio by Doug Liman, it is brisk and fun and modest in a way that Tom Cruise films almost never are.
And it is a Tom Cruise film. He’s in nearly every scene, and there is no costar with the wattage to upstage him. Cruise even narrates the goings on, Narcos-style. And yet there is a lived-in humility to his performance that Cruise aficionados haven’t seen since the opening scenes of Jerry Maguire. Seal is a lucky loser who knows how to fly planes but who otherwise stumbles his way into criminality and riches via venial US government agencies and Colombian drug cartels. Shaggy-haired, sweaty, and, for a long stretch, gap-toothed, Cruise-as-Seal is clearly having the time of his life, slumming between big-budget franchises (M:I 6 and the Top Gun sequel, God help us, are on the horizon). To watch American Made is to recall his loose charm from films past—and to think, a little mischievously, that this is one megastar who is very good at playing stupid.
So: Cruise is back, probably not for long. Which is fine. It’s late 2017, after all, and the all-American white male hero worship he so easily inspires is more than a little passé. Still, it’s nice to have him. I’m calling Mom.