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JERRY MAGUIRE [1996. Directed by Cameron Crowe. Cast: Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding Jr., Renee Zellweger. Tristar Pictures. 135 mins.]
As though confirmation is needed, Jerry Maguire sprightly reminds us that life is not fair. Only this melodramatic cliché explains secretarial-pool Dorothy Boyd's (Renee Zellweger) victory clutch when dreamy sports agent Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) tells her he's unexpectedly eligible.
Never mind he's available at a discount because he's been dumped by his employer, clients, and high-powered fiancee in rapid order. The fact Is Maguire's hit rock bottom and that's fine by the perky Dorothy.
Still, facts and circumstance alone will not change a man's life. For a man like Maguire doesn't become a man like Maguire by accident. He's earned all the perks that professional life supposedly affords any aggressive young toady. Unfortunately for this toady, the run of luck ends abruptly after one of his clients gets his bell rung through Sunday during a hockey match.
Using his ample charm in the guise of professionalism, Maguire can't quite get the simple honesty up - much less the nerve itself - to tell the player's family that Dad needs to quit the game before it's too late. It's a bad sales pitch for the agent when the guy's kid sees through him.
Upset with his own behavior, Maguire writes a fiery corporate mission statement about athletic representation that guarantees he'll get sacked. But his twitch of conscience only further confuses him because this flirtation with idealism leaves him feeling paradoxically empowered and disenfranchised.
It's these competing values that shake Jerry Maguire to his core. After losing everything he's worked for - well, everything except for the dubious representation of an overachieving Arizona Cardinal hot dog wide-receiver, Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.) - it's clearly time for him to assess the situation.
Maguire's unexpected ethical dilemma draws the best and worst out of him. He'll survive, but will he prosper? A gamesman's gamesman who's always wholeheartedly thrown himself in his lifework, Maguire's the All-American kid accustomed to playing for high stakes at life's gaming table. Unfortunately for him, he's become so obsessed with winning, he's forgotten how to keep score.
This messy situation is, of course, Hollywood economics at its best. So It must be admitted that Cameron Crow's warm-hearted comedy Is a bit contrived. But Cruise does make the humor work. And he does make Jerry Maguire as cheeky as last summer's Mission Impossible was tepid. Despite not being a natural comedian, Cruise was likable as the older brother of the sympathetic character he vividly portrayed in 1983's Risky Business.
Jerry Maguire is ultimately about facing one's lesser side. For Maguire's hustled the best of them, but somehow everyone always wises up - including the smitten Dorothy. She finds out why he's been so successful at work and so unsuccessful in life: There's little trace of him after the deal 's been set.
Getting fired from Sports Management International - and meeting Dorothy - give Jerry Maguire a chance at becoming a human being. While the film may be about sports, the story's about loyalty.
But life definitely isn't fair. Not many of us could take Maguire's punches to the jaw and end up with a happy client or loving family. Cruise therefore has a tough job making the film's contrivances seem plausible.
Just bet on the kid. Not the most talented actor of his generation - nor the most handsome - Cruise underacts with the best of movie stars who've crafted an indelible persona in America's film conscience.
The best part of Jerry Maguire is seeing a thoughtless good guy get what he deserves and still keep his neck intact. While Cruise isn't quite as stalwart as they once made the heroes in the golden age of Hollywood, his gritty smile will do.
VERTIGO [1958. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Cast: James Stewart, Kim Novak. Paramount Pictures/MCA Home Video. 120 mins.]
It's hard recalling a more deviously intelligent movie than Vertigo. Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1954 Diabolique comes close. And Georges Franju's 1959 Eyes Without a Face is a slightly weirder send-up. The French are very good at this sort of malevolent tension.
By adapting Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac's D'Entre les Morís, Alfred Hitchcock married their preoccupation with extraordinary visitations from the dead to his trademark repressed moral sensibilities. Vertigo turned out to be a potent combination of these influences bottled once and never quite recaptured again.
San Francisco Detective John "Scotty" Ferguson's (James Stewart) unfortunate twist of fate involves a criminal roof-top chase gone badly wrong where he witnesses a fellow officer plunge to his death after trying to help him from falling off a building's ledge. Ferguson Is so afflicted by guilt (and a not so unreasonable fear of heights), he essentially retires from life until an old college chum, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), asks him to tail his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), during her daily routine.
Elster tells Ferguson that Madeleine believes she's the reincarnation of a San Franciscan named Carlotta Valdez who committed suicide a century earlier. After Madeleine indeed attempts suicide by jumping Into the Frisco Bay, Ferguson saves her life and they find themselves swept up in a love affair. Their passion lasts until she accidentally falls to her death at San Juan Batista's mission tower.
Following this second mishap, Ferguson is nearly suicidal himself until after a period of convalescence he chances upon shop girl, Judy, who's remarkably reminiscent of Madeleine. Slowly slipping back into a vortex of guilt and anxiety, Ferguson makes Judy over as his beloved Madeleine until the hapless darling has been transformed into the woman he mourns.
The story's complexity was enough to throw Hitchcock 's 1958 audience for a confused loop. And granted the critics flipped over Vertigo, but then they could see exactly what Hitchcock was doing ... for a while. Decades after the film's release, it couldn't be publicly screened because of disputes over its ownership. It became a legendary unseen masterwork. Now nearly 40 years after the fact, and following a modest Hitchcock revival in the early-1980s, master film archivists Robert Harris and James Katz have remastered Vertigo for contemporary 70mm sight and Bernard Hermann's magnificent score.
What was once mind-numbing is now mind-boggling as Vertigo looks and sounds better than it originally did. What has survived the transition of time - as well as the petty feuds after the film's production - is Hitchcock's profound understanding of primal fear. His film touches a deeply felt heartbroken fear in its eulogy of Orpheus' ill-fated redemptive bid for his beloved Eurydice.
If James Stewart is most identified with his soft-hearted George Bailey of It 's a Wonderful Life, it's because Vertigo is far too crisis-inducing to warrant any such affection. Yet Stewart's performance as Scotty Ferguson lays to rest the presumption that the man wasn't a first-rate actor.
Stewart could certainly act. He just probably didn't know he had Scotty Ferguson in him. But Hitchcock did.
Watching Ferguson 's psyche twist slowly into knots by the sheer circumstances of his life is an exceedingly exquisite torture. As the forlorn former detective looks down in incredulous disbelief from his psychological precipice near the end of Vertigo, the redemptive power of love seems almost inconsequential in the face of a far more primitive bid for sanity. This film's conclusion is one of the most famed descents into hell depicted on America's silver screen.