Am I the only one bothered by Mr Cruise’s eternal machismo? His roles running up to the peak of his career portrayed him understandably in various shades of manliness, but that he continues to be trapped in this testosterone cage, where he plays a spy with guns and shampooed hair that falls in slow motion, is somewhat puzzling in terms of artistic evolution. With younger and younger girlfriends by his side—or does it only look that way as he grows older and older?—the whole picture is getting too repetitive. Like he is playing himself from his own old films, an unintentional self-parody where he faintly resembles his past self but has nothing new to do.
Masculinity is pleasing when it comes to screen idols, no doubt, but if that is an actor’s only ammunition, he is auditioning solely to be eye candy or fantasy escort. As one lives on, able to tick off activities as ‘been there, done that’, adventure perhaps lies in taking up the unknown, the untried, rather than reprise the same role again and again.
During the current shoot for the umpteenth sequel of Mission: Impossible, even cows grew dizzy as Cruise went about his usual chopper act. As he parachuted down, like manly men routinely do, the cattle in nearby fields felt their knees weaken. They fell en masse.
Why can’t Cruise play a creepy husband, an estranged father, a religious nut or even an ageing lothario who dates only girls half his age because he has birthday phobia? Married thrice, divorced thrice—if nothing else, he could bring all his relationship experience to his roles. How many Mission: Impossibles do we have to sit through before it is forever banned?
While actor Daniel Craig confesses about his 007 success, ‘I used to lock myself in and close the curtains, I was in cloud cuckoo land. I was physically and mentally under siege,’ Tom says nothing at all about the kind of roles he is stuck with. While James Bond is now carrying around a baby in his upcoming film, Cruise is rarely clicked with his own kids— not the adopted, not the biological.
The thing about being in a rut is it can get reductive—no actor can forever play a love interest or a gun-toting agent, not without boring himself now and then. Curiosity and cadences should interrupt an artist’s repertoire.
Women expect more from their screen idols than they do from the random men in their life, like spouse or sons. They expect their heroes to move with the times, to age with them, to go from monosyllabic to musing aloud, to stop dashing about to theme songs and start with the dishes.
shinieantony@gmail.com
If masculinity is an actor’s only ammunition, he is auditioning solely to be eye candy or fantasy escort