Jerry Maguire A Review By Jeremiah Rickert
Starring: Tom Cruise, Rene Zellweger, Cuba Gooding Jr., Bonnie Hunt Written and Directed by Cameron Crowe
I waited until this one came to cable before watching it. This time it was a combination of hype AND Tom Cruise that steered me away. On some levels I'm glad I didn't have to fork out any money (not counting the cost of cable TV) to see this film, on some others it may have been worth it. The film sucks us into the world of professional sports from an angle that is a fairly fresh one: From the inside of the sports management business. Jerry Maguire is a fast-talking, big-money, big-deal, sports agent with a huge firm who lives and dies by his telephone. Cruise portrays him fairly well, not well enough to be nominated for an Oscar, which he was, but with humor and a bit of genuine vulnerability amongst that which seems to be simple method-acting with a big nose. Maguire has a catharsis and decides that his career lacks soul and his life lacks purpose and he types out his memo, which flows not from his lust for cash or his desire to close the deal, but from his heart which he thinks he has lost along the way. His fiance, played by Kelly Preston (um...what else has she been in? Double Cross and SpaceCamp) is a well...psychotic codependent-type who on the one hand craves honesty, but twists it into brutality. She and Maguire are basically in a loveless relationship, which also seems to contribute to Jerry's "breakdown." (And after a seemingly gratuitous sex-scene.)
Jerry gets fired after drafting the memo because he stresses the need to have less clients which allows for a more personal business relationship. He delcares that he's starting his own firm and asks anyone who wants to come along to get up and follow him. Only one does, a soft-spoken accountant Dorothy Boyd played by Rene Zwelleger (Love and a .45). She is inspired by his memo and decides that to give meaning to her life, she needs to break off with Jerry. She seems to have a crush on Jerry from the beginning and of course, this leads to a love story, although a basically un-cliched one. Jerry calls all of his clients and only one of them will still with him, Arizona Cardinal wide-receiver Rod Tidwel, played by Cuba Gooding Jr. (Lightning Jack, A Few Good Men). Gooding won a much deserved Oscar for this role. Jerry's hole deepens when he loses a big football prospect and he breaks up with his fiance.
Thus being without clients, a job, and a fiance, Jerry finds himself alone and apparently since he has this thing about being alone, he turns to the only female in his life, Dorothy Boyd. He shows up at her house Drunk and after a few minutes of sexual tension he makes his move. He seems all the sorrier for it, however. At the Boyd house we are introduced to my favorite two characters in the film, Dorothy's sister Laurel, played wonderfully by Bonnie Hunt (Jumanji, Beethoven) and Dorothy's son Ray, played by Jonathan Lipnicki (The Jeff Foxworthy Show, Meego). Hunt's Laurel is an older, wiser, wry, Curmudgeony, woman who takes everything with a grain of salt, and has to watch her younger, skinnier sister go after some good-looking successful guy. She does it without actively seeking sympathy, to the point in reveling in her situation. There was a very moving (at least to me) scene of her sitting in the dark eating the leftovers from Jerry and Dorothy's date-dinner while the two are in bed together.
Lipnicki's Ray is a too-smart-for-his-own-good kid, but not all of the time. To the writer's credit he still does things to remind you he's a little boy and after a string of films with 8yr olds who talk like adults, it was refreshing to see a kid be a kid as well as a clever smart-aleck.
Ray and Jerry bond almost immediately, and that helps faciliate the relationship between Dorothy and Jerry. Despite his catharses, Jerry still becomes a business-robot when on the job, and this slowly begins to alienate Dorothy, so he proposes and it seems to patch things up for now, but soon he finds himself taking more and more roadtrips with Rod and spending less and less time at home. They eventually separate. Rod's lack of stellar success on the field leads to a small contract offer from the Cardinals. Jerry eventually tries to convince Rod of the same thing he had to convince himself of, that you need to play from the heart, rather than from the wallet.
Enough of the plot, on to the criticism. Crowe does a fine job juggling three disasters...Jerry's Love Life, Jerry's Career, and Rod's Contract. All of them are stories in themselves, that revolve around these characters' lives and Crowe doesn't let any of them get out of hand, and on the other side of the coin, none of them ends up getting token or cliched treatment. One of the thing that bugged me throughout the film, however, was the casting of Rene Zwelleger as Dorothy. Don't get me wrong, she did a fine job, but at times she looks about 15 years old. When she uttered the line "I am the oldest 26 year old in the world" I laughed, not because it was funny, but because it was ironic. She's another in a long line of blonde waif-like, pouty-lipped women who are supposed to be wives and mothers, but who look like they are high-schoolers. (Liar Liar's Maura Tierney and anything with Gwyneth Paltrow). Zwelleger is cute, she is at times even sexy, however, she looks 15 or 16 and did not seem to fit the character she was playing. It bugged me throughout the film. This certain body-type of woman seems to be placed in films that evoke an almost Romantic (capital R) appeal, as in, she's an incredibly cute, spunky, smart, sincere, extremely young looking, slim, single lonely woman, she's wordly wise, but only looks 16...she'd be a great leading lady.
Overall, the film was funny, Gooding Jr. and Bonnie Hunt made this film, in my opinion, and Cruise did just fine. Despite the fact that I didn't think she looked the part, Zwelleger did a fine job as well. Crowe's directing and writing were top-notch as he kept three solid stories seperate, equal, and then tied them up in the end.
Of the $10 a month extra I paid for Showtime, Jerry Maguire was worth $5
(c) 1997 Jeremiah Rickert --
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