Stanley Kubrick’s movies are focused, pointed masterpieces. They have a message. The writing is careful and direct. Kubrick had famously specific expectations when directing scenes and was known to require 50 or 60 takes to get it exactly how he wanted. Everything in the frame is there for a reason, including a sign in the background or a headline on a newspaper, or car, or an article of clothing, or the time of day.

All of Eyes Wide Shut is well made and the story is engaging but there is a scene in the middle of the movie that took my breath away.

Bill Harford walks into a room in a stranger’s home. The home is quite literally a cathedral, with high vaulted ceilings and clerestory windows. As he enters he hears a deep chanting voice singing in a different language. The room is filled with cloaked, hooded and masked people on the ground floor and in a balcony, encircling a large, red carpeted floor where a dozen others kneel, also cloaked. They circle a man in a red cloak who paces with a staff and a lamp out of which smoke slowly leaks. He chants ominously and harmoniously with a moody synthesizer holding deep brooding chords in a minor key. The kneeling figures stand and remove their cloaks. They are all statuesque, beautiful women, and they are naked. The women kneel again, and in turn lean toward each other, simulating a kiss, their faces still covered by masks. As the red man approaches each of them and taps his cane on the floor they rise.

The scene is so haunting, the music so intense, the ritual so striking. The camera lingers on the audience’s masks and they look sorrowful, staring unmoving at the proceedings. It feels worshipful and dangerous and strange.

Some of you may know that I spent a few years of my life as a member of a church in Seattle that some people would consider cult-like in its beliefs and ways of practicing religion. This scene was the only thing I’ve ever seen on film that successfully captures the intensity of a religious experience.

You know the punchline if you’ve ever heard anything about this movie: we’re at a sex party. The movie explores ideas of fidelity, sex and desire, and the differences between imagination and reality. This is the hardest to write review that I’ve done so far, because I have no idea what the message of this movie is. I just know that it is beautiful, creepy, and powerful.

If there is a metaphor I do understand about Eyes Wide Shut, it isn’t about Stanley Kubrick’s story or the imagery of the film but about its symbolic place in Tom Cruise’s career. This is Cruise’s third movie with Nicole Kidman and their last together – they divorced in 2001. I’ve heard people say that Stanley Kubrick cast them in this movie together because he wanted to fuck with them, and knowing what I do about him and how well their on-screen marriage fits my imagined perception of their real life marriage, I can’t disbelieve it.

Kidman is on fire. That’s all I will say about her performance on social media. Holy shit.

Cruise plays the first half of the movie doing a pretty nuanced Jack Nicholson impersonation – I feel like he must have studied Nicholson’s speech patterns and Kubrick’s dialogue in The Shining when preparing for this role. The great thing about his performance here is you see the classic Cruise confidence and charm early in the film and you get to watch it drip methodically out of him as his character gets more confused and frightened by the events of the plot. It’s interesting that the next 10 roles he took after this one are the most varied uneven of his career, spanning from Frank T.J. Mackey (whom I’m excited to talk about in my next review) to Les Grossman.

I feel that it would be hard to show the vulnerability that Cruise displays in this movie and not be forever changed by it. I think you could argue that the ritual in the scene above and its effect on Bill and Alice Harford’s marriage is mirrored by how Cruise’s relationship with Scientology impacted him and Kidman, or simply that getting naked and making love to your wife in a film about infidelity could make you question what you are doing with your life.

Let me also point out that during the 1990s Tom Cruise made 9 movies. Only one (Far and Away) was bad. Unlike the 1980s where he essentially played the same character in every movie, in the 90s Cruise leveraged his signature charm and realism but applied it to a ton of different genres and characters, including horror, romance, suspense, and action. These are the golden Cruise years.

Next: Magnolia

Everyone has had a moment of clarity. Probably several.

You wake up in the middle of the night and suddenly you know what you should be doing with your life. You should get back into that relationship. You should start that business. You should write that novel. You should take that trip. You should get a dog.

We know, as rational human beings, that the decisions we make in those moments are not to be trusted. We know how silly we look in hindsight. We cringe, thinking about it.

So what should we do? Common logic tells us that we should train ourselves to recognize those moments and guard against the stupid commitments we might make when we’re just a little bit out of our minds.

Jerry Maguire, Cameron Crowe’s meandering, post-modern romantic comedy, begs otherwise. It suggests that those moments are the only moments where we can truly be happy.

What’s funny about this thesis is that Cameron Crowe’s movies are known for their sentimental charm, yet Jerry Maguire is about a world where everyone is dishonest and malicious and lacking integrity. The script has an incredibly high density of characters smiling and staring into each others eyes and telling malicious lies. It is the happiest, funniest movie about dishonesty that I have ever seen. It’s this obscure tone which makes the movie feel fresh underneath the cliche’s of some fairly standard romcom moments.

And it’s the nihilism intrinsic to this tone that makes the suggestion that people should trust their illogical impulses acceptable. If you believe that people are good and generally well-intentioned, I don’t think you can agree with the message of Jerry Maguire. You could enjoy the movie and be entertained by it, but you would have to look at the final act, where Jerry decides to commit to Dorothea even though they aren’t particularly happy together, where Rod gets a big contract to continue playing football despite suffering multiple concussions, and where Laurel continues her morose, man-hating shrill women’s support group, as a melancholy end to a story about people not quite living up to their potentials. The characters smile and laugh and hug each other, but it doesn’t mean those decisions are good. They’re just moments when everything seems to make sense.

What else is there?

Tom Cruise is perfect for this role. He is basically playing the character that we have all accepted as his modern personality. A guy who could realistically jump up on Oprah’s couch in a moment of passion and glee and creepiness. He is only barely sane. He cackles. He kicks a wall. He steals a fish.

One of the things that I’ve realized while watching all of these movies is how important “good chemistry” is between actors. Cuba Gooding, Jr. stole the show and won the academy award for his part in Jerry Maguire, but I can’t imagine his performance would have worked, monologues and bellowing in all, without Cruise screaming right alongside him. It must take humility to be as willing as Cruise is in this film to portray a hero who is morally inferior to another protagonist.

But seriously, you’re telling me that Rod Tidwell is catching 110 balls for 1500 yards a year and he can’t get a contract? Someone get Cameron Crowe a sports consultant.

Next: Eye’s Wide Shut

I have seen Mission: Impossible a bunch of times, and I like it, but I’ve always felt like I couldn’t really decode it. When I watched it a couple of days ago I sat down with a notepad and tried to chart out everything that is going on. It’s difficult. For an action blockbuster, this is a complex movie.

The beginning is especially confusing. We see an agent watching an interrogation on a monitor. It starts at the end of a story unrelated to the rest of the movie – we don’t know who is being interrogated or why, or which side we’re supposed to be “rooting for.” The set feels stark and plastic. I’m reminded that Mission: Impossible was a TV show in the 1960s and 70s.

Cut to Jon Voight. An old-school action star. He smokes. He’s suave. He has an uncharacteristically young and beautiful wife. It’s almost a noir when we see Cruise and Voight skulking around in the dark and mist near the beginning of the film. Voight is a symbol of this older world where decisions are made by men in suits and with gray hair smoking on airplanes. The IMF leadership are all older, white men.

Cruise is a symbol of modernity. His hair is unkempt. He runs everywhere. He frequently masks himself as powerful members of the hegemony but his character is creative, maverick and focused. He cracks jokes. He does magic tricks.

The characters who are successful in Mission: Impossible are those who buck traditional trends and represent a society that appreciates diverse worldviews. The motherly, middle-aged female arms dealer. The luxurious, giddy braggadocio black hacker. And a young, infatigable secret agent who refuses to believe the rules apply to him.

This movie is about change. Cruise sprints away from a restaurant that is literally flooded with the trappings of spy movies and cracks the case because he embraces new technology (i.e. the internet). But the old world isn’t dead. Jon Voight reappears and his existence puts everyone in danger.

For an action movie, it is bizarrely serene. Save for the action scene on the train at the end there is very little action. Most of the violence occurs off-screen. The heist scene is silent, still and slow-moving, purely intense. The score is slow and dissonant. It is designed by Brian DePalma to make you feel like something is amiss. Because like a secret agent wearing a mask, something is, even if you don’t notice it.

DePalma loves the grotesque baroqueness of those masks. Whenever Cruise rips one off the camera lingers on the rubber and sinew shredding like a reptilian skin and revealing a fresh new face underneath. Modernity. Change. Rebirth.

It’s crazy how different this movie is tonally from the recent entries into the M:I franchise. But we’ll get to that.

The only thing this movie gets wrong is the internet. Somehow Ethan Hunt successfully contacts a mysterious arms dealer by inventing an email address with no domain based on a usenet discussion group he found. Screenwriters could get away with that in 1996, but it feels false and off-putting to watch today.

This comes 10 years after Cruise’s other career-defining role in Top Gun. While Top Gun is remembered fondly mostly for nostalgic reasons, this one is a clear illustration of why Tom became the biggest movie star on the planet.

Not a lot of popcorn movies go this deep. You’ve probably seen it multiple times like I have. Watch it again.

Next: Jerry Maguire

Maybe Tom Cruise is actually a vampire. Maybe for his entire career he has been playing a gregarious, obsessive human to disguise his true identity. Evidence:

• He has weirdly shaped teeth. 
• He doesn’t seem to have aged.
• He belongs to a bizarre religion that probably doesn’t believe in drinking human blood, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
• The women he marries tend to turn into pale, lifeless wisps.

The Firm is surprisingly subtle. It is a movie about lawyers in which we never see a courtroom. It is a movie with a clear sense of morality – The titular firm is bad and Tom Cruise is good – but with a great deal of sympathy for the characters who personify the firm and what it does.

The thing I found myself thinking over and over again while watching The Firm was that the movie could never have been greenlit in today’s cinema. It is not an overly serious, preachy drama. There are no monologues at all that I can recall, and certainly none where characters yell and pound their chest about their worldviews. The plot takes odd turns, indulging in characters like Holly Hunter’s Tammy, her husband, an Elvis impersonator, and her lover, an ex-con-turned-private-investigator played by Gary Busey. An important character central to the resolution of the plot is introduced in the latter part of the third act.

The Firm is also not a typical summer action blockbuster. There are a few gunshots in the movie but outside of the now-requisite Tom Cruise running scene all of the action occurs off screen and nobody saves the world at all. In fact, at the end of the movie Tom Cruise goes out of his way to NOT save the world. It would not have been successful in today’s cinema, and if it had been approved and marketed and sold to American audiences it definitely would not have starred Tom Cruise.

The score is surprising, too, steering clear of sweeping classical strings and almost completely devoid of a soundtrack, almost entirely filled with playful, bluesy piano. It serves as an indicator, a nod from Sydney Pollack the Director saying “yes, this is kind of a silly premise for a movie. It’s ok. Let’s just have some fun.” And it is fun. The movie works.

I’m not sure if we’re at an irreversible point in American cinema where movies like The Firm can’t emerge in Hollywood and people must turn to television for modest adult-oriented dramas where people solve their problems mostly through talking, but it does seem like the last 10 years of movies have been almost completely devoid of films like this. I know that isn’t entirely true, and a lot of medium to low budget dramas are being produced and made and exist slightly under the radar only to be discovered on Netflix or touted by cinephiles until their friends eventually cave and pretend they like them, but the fact that these movies aren’t present in our common pop culture conversations is kind of the point.

And I can’t say that I even care, either, because I’m as guilty as the next guy of getting excited about whatever Thanos is going to do with that stupid glove and watching big strong men punch each other into buildings in 150 minute chunks. I probably wouldn’t even go see The Firm if it came out in theaters today. But I can tell you that I was a whole lot more satisfied after watching it than I was at the end of The Avengers: Age of Ultron, which I watched on the same flight.

Ok, I didn’t mean for this to be so cynical. The Firm is okay. It’s not going to change your life, but it’s well made. The performances are good. I know you don’t really care and are just waiting for me to get to Mission: Impossible. Me too.

Next: Interview with the Vampire

Full disclosure: I am an unabashed Aaron Sorkin supporter. Not everyone is, and I get that. Aaron Sorkin doesn’t feel the need to write dialogue that resembles human conversation. He tells us that his protagonists are flawed, but doesn’t often show us. His plays are often essays, or perhaps more accurately, lectures on his worldview. He also finds a unique poetry in the cadence and repetition of musical theater (he was a musical theater major in college and often cites Gilbert and Sullivan and other wordy music) which leads to exchanges like this:

“We either get it done or I’m gonna hang your boy from a fucking yardarm.”
“A yardarm? Sherman does the navy still hang people from yardarms?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Dave, Sherman doesn’t think the navy hangs people from yardarms anymore.”

I think the reason that some people don’t like Sorkin is because he finds time for the meticulousness of language but often doesn’t seem to be concerned about the drama of his stories. Early in A Few Good Men, we see a crime being committed. Then we learn the perpetrators of the crime and see the discussions and preamble to the crime itself. We know the guilty parties without a doubt before the plot of the movie really begins. To Sorkin, the more interesting part is the argument, not the result.

He is interested in the moment when the hero (who has been capable of beating the villain all along) realizes his capabilities and responsibilities. He believes that some people are intrinsically better than others and that those people have the duty to use their powers for good.

In short, he believes in superheroes.

Tom Cruise is this movie’s superhero. Everyone else is flawed, makes mistakes, lies and takes shortcuts, but Cruise’s character Danny Kaffee is tasked with simply realizing that he is a great attorney. He is better than his legendary now-deceased attorney father, he is better than the entire United States Marine Corps.

This movie has a lot of wonderful moments. If you like wordy, idealistic legal dramas, I would suggest you watch it. I won’t say anything else about the plot.

“Are you asking me out on a date?”
“No.”
“It sounded like you were asking me out on a date.”
“No.”
“I’ve been asked out on dates before, and that’s what it sounds like.”

I’ve mentioned before that Cruise’s career is marked by apprenticeships. In The Color of Money he studies under Paul Newman and Martin Scorcese. In Rain Man he works alongside Dustin Hoffman. In 1999 he’ll star in the last film by the great Stanley Kubrick and one of the first films of P.T. Anderson, widely recognized as the greatest director currently working. It’s hard not to believe that his performance in A Few Good Men is largely motivated by the presence of Jack Nicholson. He even does a Jack Nicholson impersonation in the movie, for God’s sake, and it’s spot on of course.

I’ve also mentioned before that you see the seams and strategies behind Cruise’s choice of role and subject matter during the 80s. He goes from a character actor to a sort of goofy leading man to starring in more serious movies and toeing the line with different approaches to physicality and tone.

Frankly, Sorkin is right in Cruise’s wheelhouse, as it features serious material with many lighthearted moments and dialogue that requires constant commitment and presence, Cruise’s specialties. He’s not the only actor that could make A Few Good Men work (it was a hit play on Broadway before being turned into a film by Rob Reiner) but he is good in it, and he brings a physical presence to his monologue and his bombastic debate with Nicholson at the end that elevates the material by standing up to the heady language.

But it’s worth noting that in the same year, Cruise stars in Far and Away which is a complete misapplication of his talents, and that in 1993 Nicole Kidman stars in a lesser known Sorkin movie called Malice. It’s a strange time in his career and you can see Kidman’s influence more than the careerism that drove his 80s performances.

Anyway, I love this movie. But there are a few things that don’t hold up particularly well:

-The score. Full of minor-key synthesizer, this alone makes the movie feel incredibly dated.
-The constant mentions of Guantanamo Bay. I’m not sure if this is a detracting factor or not, but the fact that Gitmo plays such a prominent role in this movie is a bit distracting considering what we know now.
-Demi Moore’s hair. Eeesh.

Next: The Firm

If I had to create a list of premises for Tom Cruise movies that I would find implausible solely because Tom Cruise was in them, it would go something like this:

• A movie in which Tom Cruise has an ethnic or regional accent
• A period piece
• A movie in which Tom Cruise is a champion prize fighter
• A movie in which Tom Cruise tames wild horses by punching them in the nose
• A movie in which Tom Cruise builds the entire transcontinental railroad