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#334 - Jerry Maguire
Cameron Crowe, 1996
A wildly successful yet emotionally stunted sports agent has a crisis of conscience and is forced to restart his business from the ground up with the help of one of his assistants and the one client who hasn't abandoned him.
Almost twenty years after its most memorably schmaltzy and overdone lines of dialogue leaked into the cultural consciousness, I am finally getting around to watching Jerry Maguire and...well I guess it's not quite as bad as I'd expected, but the sentimentality and idealism on display only go so far to prop up an otherwise heavy-handed film. Despite earning an Oscar nomination for his role here, this is Tom Cruise running through all his usual acting tricks to bring the eponymous character to what I guess can be called life and thus there is nothing about his work here that stands out against either his other Oscar-nominated turns or any other halfway-serious role he's played. The supporting cast is debatable at best - though Cuba Gooding Jr. does deliver a decent enough performance that I suppose could be worthy of an Oscar, he doesn't seem to get much of an arc of his own beyond serving both Cruise's personal and professional journeys. At least Regina King makes the most of her relatively small role as Gooding Jr.'s wife and definitely comes across as one of the best performances in the film, which stands in stark contrast to Renée Zellweger's extremely underwhelming turn as the single mother who is inspired by Cruise's principled stand and joins him as he attempts to restart his business. Otherwise, the cast involves a bunch of unremarkable characters with varying levels of antagonism towards Cruise and his mission, whether it's Bonnie Hunt as Zellweger's distrustful but supportive sister through to Jay Mohr as Cruise's insufferable business rival.
I don't know whether or not I should commend or condemn Crowe's capacity for sentimentality and idealism, which is more that ably demonstrated through this film. This film does go through the effort of showing the difficulty of trying to deliver a personalised approach in an extremely impersonal and greedy field, as well as Cruise's struggle to stick with his newly discovered principles even after they get him fired, though these developments aren't often compelling enough to feel like they justify their continued presence. The behind-the-scenes sports drama generally doesn't feel too compelling, if only because it feels like it's being sidelined and underdeveloped in favour of the rather desperate-looking romance that gradually unfolds between Cruise and Zellweger. I guess there's just enough quality so that it doesn't feel completely awful, but it's still an awfully saccharine, obvious and overly long excuse for a dramedy that I definitely don't need to see more than once.
Cameron Crowe, 1996
A wildly successful yet emotionally stunted sports agent has a crisis of conscience and is forced to restart his business from the ground up with the help of one of his assistants and the one client who hasn't abandoned him.
Almost twenty years after its most memorably schmaltzy and overdone lines of dialogue leaked into the cultural consciousness, I am finally getting around to watching Jerry Maguire and...well I guess it's not quite as bad as I'd expected, but the sentimentality and idealism on display only go so far to prop up an otherwise heavy-handed film. Despite earning an Oscar nomination for his role here, this is Tom Cruise running through all his usual acting tricks to bring the eponymous character to what I guess can be called life and thus there is nothing about his work here that stands out against either his other Oscar-nominated turns or any other halfway-serious role he's played. The supporting cast is debatable at best - though Cuba Gooding Jr. does deliver a decent enough performance that I suppose could be worthy of an Oscar, he doesn't seem to get much of an arc of his own beyond serving both Cruise's personal and professional journeys. At least Regina King makes the most of her relatively small role as Gooding Jr.'s wife and definitely comes across as one of the best performances in the film, which stands in stark contrast to Renée Zellweger's extremely underwhelming turn as the single mother who is inspired by Cruise's principled stand and joins him as he attempts to restart his business. Otherwise, the cast involves a bunch of unremarkable characters with varying levels of antagonism towards Cruise and his mission, whether it's Bonnie Hunt as Zellweger's distrustful but supportive sister through to Jay Mohr as Cruise's insufferable business rival.
I don't know whether or not I should commend or condemn Crowe's capacity for sentimentality and idealism, which is more that ably demonstrated through this film. This film does go through the effort of showing the difficulty of trying to deliver a personalised approach in an extremely impersonal and greedy field, as well as Cruise's struggle to stick with his newly discovered principles even after they get him fired, though these developments aren't often compelling enough to feel like they justify their continued presence. The behind-the-scenes sports drama generally doesn't feel too compelling, if only because it feels like it's being sidelined and underdeveloped in favour of the rather desperate-looking romance that gradually unfolds between Cruise and Zellweger. I guess there's just enough quality so that it doesn't feel completely awful, but it's still an awfully saccharine, obvious and overly long excuse for a dramedy that I definitely don't need to see more than once.