Director: Cameron Crowe
Cast: Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, Kurt Russell, Jason Lee
Have I Seen it Before: I mad a point to really insist I liked it back in my teenage years. I had been a fan of Say Anything… (1989) and Jerry Maguire (1996) and felt like if I just pretended to like it real hard, I’d eventually get it and get there.
I never really did.
Did I Like It: The question becomes, then, considering how much I enjoyed Maguire on re-examination*, that even if this one doesn’t quite measure up, I still would surely have a new appreciation of it.
And it really isn’t there, unfortunately. Cameron’s other movies—so at least I can stop harping on Maguire—beg us to feel more, where this film keeps us at a distance, even and especially in the final act when David (Cruise) is supposed to be either, or simultaneously losing his mind or becoming a better person. That feeling is only reinforced after reading a little bit about the production and getting the distinct sense that remaking the spanish Abre Los Ojos (1997) was something closer to a cinematic experience than a real artistic impulse. I suppose, in that sense, we got off lucky. Crowe could have done a shot-for-shot remake of North by Northwest (1959) when he decided to go into the movie laboratory just for the sake of the laboratory.
Removing a degree of authorship from Crowe, the film does appear to be interesting on a whole other level than it was originally, or to my mind has ever really been discussed. The unravelling of this human soul, the simmering contempt for the psychiatrist (Russell), and the eventual realization that only Tech Support will be able to set our hero free, may make this Tom Cruise’s response to Battlefield Earth (2000). Can a film be accidetnally about Scientology? Maybe, but not with Cruise starring and producing.
*It’s intuitive to compare the two films, given their star and director and relative proximity to one another in time, but they really are like films from different planets.