Who is that unmasked man?

On loving Tom Cruise movies

Something I’ve recently realized about myself: I will watch any Tom Cruise movie. I will do so unquestioningly. Only rarely will I venture to an actual movie theater to see one because I will only rarely venture to an actual movie theater to see anything, but if a recent Tom Cruise movie shows up on my Netflix account, that’s what I’m watching. I will watch it once, I will enjoy it, and, if asked about it even half an hour after the fact, I will be unable to recount almost anything about it.

I have seen every Mission: Impossible film and I could not even begin to tell you the plot of any of them. Last night, I watched the second Jack Reacher film, whose full title I cannot recall. Nor do I really remember anything about it other than Cobie Smulders was in it, and the only reason that fact sticks with me is because I once got to pretend to make out with her for a film we were in called They Came Together.

Over the last decade or so, Tom Cruises’ movies have become, essentially, indistinguishable. They may dabble in genre (Edge of Tomorrow, The Mummy), but they never stray from traditional Hollywood narrative structure, and they never require Tom Cruise to be anything other than Tom Cruise. Ethan Hunt is the same as Jack Reacher is the same as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. He’s the roguish alpha male with quick fists and a winning smile.

I love him? Photo by HENRY NICHOLLS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

From an acting point of view, that’s a shame because Tom Cruise is indisputably, a great actor. Look at his performances in Rain Man, Jerry Maguire, Tropic Thunder, Magnolia. He can do anything. What he chooses to do, of late, is one thing. Action hero. Box office buster. Hollywood ambassador. And, of course, cult leader.

(I guess, technically, that’s several things, but they’re all of a piece.)

The Scientology thing is now as entwined with Cruise as his biggest roles. For some reason, though, all of the creepy and potentially criminal charges leveled against the organization have done little to hurt him. I don’t have any particular opinion about Scientology as a religion – to me, it’s no weirder than any other – but there are serious allegations of wrongdoing by its senior leadership, and Tom Cruise is very much part of that senior leadership. But he’s Tom Friggin’ Cruise, so we have collectively chosen to ignore that uncomfortable aspect of his resumé.

Is Tom Cruise a good person? I have no idea. I suspect, like everybody else, he’s complicated. I’ve heard mostly good things about the guy from people who have worked with him, but people also report that there’s something kind of off about the dude. I don’t necessarily mean that in a negative way, just that there’s an unreality about him, as if he’s unable to disentangle the persona of Tom Cruise from the person.

Maybe that’s inevitable when you’ve been among the biggest movie stars in the world for decades. Maybe, but maybe not. I mean, you don’t hear that about Tom Hanks or Clint Eastwood or Sandra Bullock or Denzel Washington. What you hear about those people is that they’re people. They do peoply things. They have peoply families with peoply problems. Not so with Cruise.

My impression is that he lives a highly sequestered life singularly focused on movie-making and cult-tending. That’s ok. A lot of people are singularly focused, but few of those people are as visible as Tom Cruise. Despite his very public marriages, we know next to nothing about his personal life. We know he’s got several kids but we never see him with them. His ex-wives do not speak about him. Nobody speaks about him in anything above whispered tones.

I don’t know why that is.

He strikes me as a kind of avatar. For what, I’m not even sure. For being Tom Cruise, I guess. He is as much the idea of Tom Cruise as he is the actual Tom Cruise. People don’t relate to him the way they did to, for example, one of his most famous co-stars, Paul Newman. Tom Cruise says nothing about politics. Promotes no causes. Says nothing about, well, anything, other than the movies he’s making and, once, while jumping up and down on a couch, to proclaim his love for his third wife, Katie Holmes. Our relationship with him is the strangest kind of intimacy: we are so familiar with the man, yet we know almost nothing about him. He’s the closest thing we have to an actual Wizard of Oz.

Perhaps his increasing solitude from the world is the reason he now only makes the kinds of eminently watchable yet eminently forgettable films that have become his trademark. After a lifetime of exposure, maybe he’s chosen to become – in the most public way possible – invisible. It’s a neat trick, to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Now he’s in his sixties and, at long last, his age is starting to show on that perfect Hollywood face. Not a lot because Tom Cruise has mastery over nearly everything, including, apparently, time. But it will be interesting to see how he eventually transitions from action hero to whatever comes next. Maybe we’ll eventually again see his extraordinary range. Maybe he’ll take on more nuanced roles, softer roles, parts that require him to expose himself in ways that we haven’t seen in along time. Or naybe he’ll still be jumping out of airplanes without a parachute at eighty-years-old. I don’t know. But I’ll almost certainly be watching. I can’t say I love Tom Cruise. How do you love somebody you know next to nothing about? But I can say I love Tom Cruise movies. It’s not the kind of abiding love I feel for, say, any number of Coen Brothers films. I feel the same way about Tom Cruise movies that I do about Taco Bell. I love it, but within five minutes of finishing either one, I may feel full but I can’t say I feel satisfied.