Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage

by Iain Johnstone

  After his New York house-husbanding, Tom needed to get back to work. His star was not yet back in the ascendant position it had been prior to the controversies of his personal life. Nevertheless it was a surprise to see him agree to do ‘Knight and Day’, a script which over the past seven years had been through ten writers and as many stars and directors. Possibly when Cameron Diaz brought the project to him, after their success d’estime in ‘Vanilla Sky’, he thought it might be their last shot as rom-com leads as she was approaching forty and he fifty, although both were in pretty good shape. Also, he believed he could knock the script into shape. The story begins with Tom, as an FBI man, killing the all the occupants of a commercial aircraft (flight deck included) while Cameron is in the loo - and becomes more incredible from then on. Cameron, an auto-parts repairer, is perpetually being put to sleep and waking up in strange places including Jamaica, where she has fortunately remembered to pack a red bikini, Salzburg and Seville. Plenty of action to take our minds off the lack of plot which has something to do with a man who has invented a very strong battery,

  Predictably the American critics ridiculed it and this tourist romp for the middle-aged was trounced at the domestic box-office by ‘Toy Story’, ‘The Karate Kid’, ‘Shrek Forever’ and ‘Get Him to the Geek’. It was quite a far cry from Virginia Woolf.

  But it is unwise to underestimate the commercial acumen of Tom Cruise and he knew his stock overseas, where he was still a largely untarnished star, was as high as ever and the romp brought in more than $200 million compared to its miserly $60 million in the States. This was a significant pointer to how more bacon might be brought home by a fourth ‘Mission: Impossible’

  Both stars travelled abroad to promote the film and their combined charisma had the desired effect in box-office returns. I have never seen Tom more at ease nor more himself than when he, and Cameron, appeared on the popular BBC automobile programme, ‘Top Gear’, which had brought a unique macho glamour to old and new bangers.

  Usually we see stars promoting their films in well-controlled junkets where TV reporters and journalists are flown to a major city, put up in a comfortable hotel, shown the new movie and then allowed to lob a few questions at the stars for about five minutes each the next day. Especially in television it is a fail-safe operation for the studios as most magazine shows are hungry for big names and free material and no reporter would be stupid enough to be critical of the new movie or star performance as there would be no more junkets for him.

  ‘Top Gear’ embodies the attitude of the fictitious Daily Telegraph motoring correspondent, J. Bonnington-Jagworth, a man with chamois driving gloves with the backs cut out and views that are not benign to those who do not have the good fortune to be English or own expensive motors. Jeremy Clarkson and his two sidekicks try, teasingly or for real, to perpetuate this philosophy and even have a masked stooge called ‘The Stig’ ,an appellation used for new boys at Clarkson’s minor public school.

  As Cameron was filmed doing her obligatory lap in the ‘reasonably priced car’ she had clearly been coached by the aforementioned and cried out “Sorry, Stig, totally fucking up”, also berating the left-hand-drive gear box with “fucking English gears”.

  “Actually, they’re Korean,’ Clarkson pointed out, adding ironically, “some of this is broadcastable.”

  Tom was cleaner-spoken but skilfully tilted the car on two wheels in its final approach. They whooped with joy when Cameron went to the top of the leader board beating the current holder, Rupert Grint of ‘Harry Potter’, by .3 of a second but then Tom was revealed to have improved on her time by a full second. I have rarely seen him happier.

  He was eager to swop anecdotes with Clarkson about GTO motorbikes and P51 Mustangs and when the presenter asked him if he puked during ‘Top Gun’, he acknowledged that in a test flight with a navy pilot called Bozo in an F16 he filled a sick bag. As Bozo pulled out of the steep dive he yelled: “What were you doing?” and the pilot replied: “They don’t call me Bozo for nothing.”

  Both Cruise and Paramount knew that there was more money to be squeezed out of the Mission Impossible series. After all, James Bond had gone from strength to strength. But there was need to pour new blood into the old format so two writers from ‘Alias’, the popular TV series which had Jennifer Garner as spook Sydney Bristow, were hired to come up with the script with J. J. Abrams keeping a watchful eye as producer. Boldly they went for a director who had never made a live action feature before. But Brad Bird had made his mark with animated films, most notably ‘Ratatouille’ and, before that, ‘The Incredibles’.

  “His animation always had an incredible live-action feel,” Cruise pointed out, and had once told him that if ever he wanted to do live action, Tom was the man to call. Paramount had no objection. Nor did they to Tom’s insistence that the new film be shot on IMAX. To add colour to the Mission – who bombed the Kremlin? – there were scenes in Prague, Bangalore, Mumbai and Dubai – where Tom could scale the outside glass of the Burj Kalifa, the world’s tallest building – and Paula Patton fresh from ‘Precious’ and ‘Déjà Vu”. Jeremy Renner, Oscar nominated for the past two years for ‘The Hurt Locker’ and ‘The Town’ brought class to the team and Simon Pegg, the British comedy actor, played MI’s nutty version of Q.

  As Tom scaled the 2723 feet tall building his co star Paula Patton recalled: "I was praying for him because it was quite intense, but he blows your mind because he's out there hanging from one of the tallest buildings in the world and he has an enormous smile on his face. He is meant to do this. One of the most fearless people I've ever met".

  Of course this could have been be accomplished with Computer Generated Imagery but Cruise intuited the need to tell his public and his critics that he had regained his unique compulsion and his guts. Manohla Dargis perceptivelywrote in her New York Times review: ‘Over the years Mr. Cruise, a divinely superficial presence in pop fodder like “Top Gun,” has grown progressively heavier, weighted down by stardom, ambition and the misstep of turning his personal life into a public drama. At times he can feel leaden. Unexpectedly, though, his age and inescapable gravitas work for “Ghost Protocol,” partly because they invest the outrageous stunts with a real sense of risk. Mr. Cruise’s primary job in the “Mission” series is to embody a not-quite-ordinary man whose powers are at once extraordinary and completely believable. When Mr. Cruise hangs off the building what you see isn’t just a man doing a crazy stunt, but also one poignantly denying his own mortality.’

  The stunt worked!

  Katie Holmes was to become embroiled in a controversy not in any way of her own making. The men behind the clever, cult TV series ‘24’ which followed Kiefer Sutherland for an hour in real time each episode, were commissioned to make eight hours of television about ‘The Kennedys’. This was destined for the History Channel but it is believed that members of the Kennedy family, on seeing the scripts, leaned upon Disney, owners of the channel, and it was pulled. Katie had already filmed her role as Jackie Kennedy when she heard the news. “I was in Whole Foods in the checkout line when I got a phone call from my agent. I still had to get my groceries! I was as shocked as everybody else because we just didn’t see it coming. Of course, I definitely felt saddened and was waiting nervously to see what would happen.”

  It was a storm in a political teacup; the only people who could have been offended were the surviving members of the family who did not want the public to be reminded of Joe Kennedy’s attempts to keep the USA out of World War Two, his use to the Mafia to get Illinois support for Jack as president and ordering the lobotomy of his daughter, Rosemary. It might have been hard to portray such a man in a good light. Apart from Jack’s unhealthy sexual appetite the series was, by and large, favourable to the famous family and, most especially, the tolerant Jackie. Katie looked the part and played the part persuasively, finding a fine line between the First Lay’s ‘little me’ modesty and her royal imperiousness.

  The programme surfaced on the small Ree
lzChannel in the States which immediately doubled its subscriptions. And the voters for the 2011 Emmies were not cowed by the History Channel’s lack of commitment, giving it four awards, including one for Barry Pepper as Bobby Kennedy, and a nomination as Best Miniseries. No prizes for Katie who, predictably, attracted mixed reviews but I cannot see anyone who would have done it much better.

  That the fourth ‘Mission Impossible’ would make a profit was a near-certainty but the questions remained: how much, and was there an appetite for any more? To this end, long before the movie was made, in 2008, Cruise acquired the rights to another action hero. This was retired Major Jack Reacher, thirteen years a military policeman, but now a loner who wanders the United States with a toothbrush in his pocket and a conscience to rectify injustice when he encounters it.

  He is the creation of an English writer, Jim Grant, who attended JR Tolkien’s old school, King Edward’s in Birmingham, read law at university, but then festered for thirteen years in the presentation department of Granada Television in Manchester. When reshuffled out of a job he began to write as Lee Childs and, amazingly, sixteen Jack Reacher books sprang from his laptop in consecutive years. By 2008 he topped the best-seller charts in both Britain and the US where he had set up home with his American wife.

  “Almost retrospectively, what I realised with Reacher is that he's the same character who's always existed in fiction,” Grant/Childs observed. “People say he's from American westerns, meaning he's a mysterious drifter who shows up unexplained in the nick of time, and I say yes, but that was merely a version itself of the old medieval figure, the knight errant.'

  If Reacher were put on film, Childs said he would want a Lawrence Dallaglio (a huge English rugby hunk) look-alike in the lead role. But, in the event, he didn’t turn down Tom’s dollar.

  Cruise choose to start with ‘One Shot”, Child’s ninth novel. It begins ‘Jack Reacher is working on his tan with a Norwegian blonde on the beach in Miami. The weather is hot and he is so cool you could skate on him. But he doesn't like to stick around. He likes to be on the move. He was in the machine his whole life. Then the machine coughed and spat him out. Now he takes it easy. He's not looking for trouble. But sometimes trouble looks for Reacher.

  A lone gunman hides in a parking garage and shoots into a crowd in a public plaza in a small Indiana city. Five random people die in a senseless massacre. The shooter leaves a perfect trail behind him and the police quickly track him down. His name is James Barr. It's a watertight case. After his arrest, James Barr refuses to talk. Then, to his lawyer, he utters a single phrase: "Get Jack Reacher for me." But Reacher's already on his way. What could connect this obvious psychopath with our wandering ex-army cop?’

  The cast includes the beautiful Oxford graduate, Rosamund Pike, as Helen Rodin; Robert Duvall as Cash; and the fearsome looking German director; Werner Herzog as The Zecc.

  Cruise shredly engaged Christopher McQuarrie to adapt the book and, also, to direct it. Mc Quarrie’s previous experience directing was more than ten years previously. ‘The Way of the Gun’ had been seen by some as a violent, over-the-top Peckinpah style of movie but doubtless Tom would temper any attempts here to turn him into a Grubby Harry.

  The main location was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and he, Katie and Suri took over the penthouse floor of the Fairmont Hotel. In late November 2011, family photos of them all skating together circulated the world’s press. The caption read: ‘Suri looked adorable in a gray dress and pink leggings, while mom Katie sported flared jeans and a winter-ready sweater. Papa Tom proved that he’s still got it, looking good in a green turtleneck and fitted, dark jeans. The happy family definitely had reason to party this weekend – Tom and Katie celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary on Friday.’

  Both were soon off to promote films: Tom’s ‘Ghost Protocol’ and Katie in the Adam Sandler vehicle ‘Jack and Jill’ in which the comic actor portrayed brother amd sister twins and Katie was their younger sister. When Sandler started out in films Universal Pictures assigned, Carr d’Angelo, a vice-president, to them to make sure no press saw them before the public; that way they would cover their low budget cost before any adverse word. Columbia would appear to have done the same here so that ‘Jack and Jill’ made an excellent $25 million in its opening week-end, thanks in part, to its impressive rota of guest shots ranging from Al Pacino to John McEnroe. But with the internet it is less easy to shoo off the critics one of whom wrote: ‘Jack and Jill is a movie that’s hateful, juvenile, and just plain bad. It’s got miserably stupid characters, half-baked humor, and it feels more like sketch comedy.’

  Tom will come up very different in June 2012, when the film of the jukebox musical ‘Rock of Ages’ with Russell Brand, featuring songs from Styx, Journey, Bon Jovi, Pat Benatar, Twisted Sister, Steve Perry, Poison and Asia, is released. This started life in a small theatre in Los Angeles and gradually spread internationally. Cruise claims he was pushed into the part of rocker, Stacee Jaxx, by his wife and daughter: "I had started dancing because I was inspired by Katie. She kept saying, 'You've got to do a musical some time.' Katie is a dancer, so she would say, 'Let's go to dance class,' and she would take us."

  Also Suri was a major fan of ‘Hairspray’, made by the same director, Adam Shankman. “What he accomplished with 'Hairspray' was amazing. My daughter has seen it 15 times and our whole family has watched it over and over and it's just enormously entertaining.

  As Tom approaches his fiftieth birthday on 3rd July 2012 – promising to hold parties in countries throughout the world - it would seem that his young wife and daughter have reinvigorated him, personally and professionally, rescuing his reputation from the negative years of parting from Nicole, and preaching a bit too much.

  Professionally he has a full dance card with a dozen projects in preparation for the years ahead – including ‘Top Gun 2’ with Jerry Bruckheimer back producing and Tony Scott at the helm. In the first two projects he is, apparently, slated to play US soldiers going off to fight aliens. Harrison Ford is 70 ten days after Tom turns 50 and, if he can still jump on his horse and do battle with those pesky warriors from the Solar System, why not Thomas Mapother IV? And there is even the possibility of a movie with his chum, David Beckham – “but he’d have to teach me how to play soccer first.”.

  Tom was at the BFI IMAX in Waterloo on December 13th 2011 to promote ‘Ghost Protocol’. Paramount celebrated its 100th birthday – the oldest studio – in 2012 and, far from just forgiving Tom, chose his film to unveil its anniversary logo – the familiar Ben Lomond refreshed with new clouds and stars. He already had done a tour of premieres including Japan, India, Dubai, Spain and Germany. And he had worked the crowds there as furiously as he did in Waterloo.. Nobody does it better. Tom is everybody’s friend, not just the thousands of young women who besiege him for photos on their cell phone but he even chats to their mothers and their mothers’ mothers. With marketing like that, he could sell them ‘Ishtar 11’ and make it a worldwide hit. Next it was off to Rio de Janeiro, with the premiere streamed throughout the world on the internet. So before the film opened in Cruise’s native country, it already had made a mighty noise round the world and was trailing enthusiastic reviews like ‘more than enough bang for your buck’ and Brad Bird was being worshipped for the way he endowed the action sequences with ‘the limitlessness of cartoons’.

  Actually he needn’t have worried about a negative response when he returned to the USA. It was possibly the best ever. ‘With Tom Cruise in top form, this Paramount released should add substantially’ to the grand total of a franchise that has hauled in $1.4b to date’ – Hollywood Reporter. ‘What makes Tom Cruise run — run harder and run faster, leaping from one building and dangling off another, the world’s tallest — as he does to exhausting, unnerving his latest exercise in extreme performance? It has Mr. Cruise hurtling through the movie as if his life depended on it, which, to judge by the hard line of his jaw, his punishingly fit body and the will etched into his every movement,
may be what’s at stake.’ – The New York Times. ‘This is Cruise's show and the actor brings to the role a startling athletic grace and becoming maturity. If someone asks you what a true movie star is, point to Cruise.’ - Rolling Stone.

  In the US Cruise was back. Not any more a prophet without honor, but with profit and honor. The UK reviews for the film were less worshipful; due to our literary tradition, Brit crits have the annoying habit of wanting a cohesive narrative, even in a fantasy film cf Harry Potter. But they bought the ‘swings from a tall building’ sensation. However the fans had no such reservations – even before they had seen the film! Let us leave Tom celebrating with his vast army of London disciples. Like the Duke of Wellington before him the stage for his acclaimed conquest was Waterloo.

  Waterloo - and all the world.