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Now Cruise has his best shot in a sprawling, squalling film on Hollywood's favorite serious subject. Born on the Fourth of July, directed by Oliver Stone (Platoon), is a Viet Nam melodrama pitched at high decibel level for 2 hr. 23 min. The movie is a jeremiad not just against the war but also against the cultural authorities who encouraged it from the pulpit, the blackboard, the dining-room table and the movie screen. This is an anti-Hollywood movie too; everything that was terrific in, say, Top Gun -- the war, the sex, the male bonding -- is found to be toxic here. It is also a one-character story whose lead actor must grow and shrivel, rage and endure in every scene. And Cruise pulls it off. He carries the film heroically, like a soldier bearing a wounded comrade across a battlefield. He is the very best thing in a very big picture.
Born on the Fourth of July is the true story of Ron Kovic, a kid from Long Island, N.Y., who got his spine shattered in Viet Nam. Back home he became bitter, questioning his old values of family and patriotism, before convincing himself he could best serve his country as a squad leader in the war against the war. This morality play could be a turnoff if it weren't for Cruise's presence. Says Tom Pollock, head of Universal Pictures, the film's patron: "Tom Cruise is all America's all-American boy. The film's journey is more powerful when it is made by the maverick from Top Gun. It's not only Ron who goes through this wrenching story, it is Tom Cruise -- our perception of Tom Cruise."
Casting against type, of course, can lead to a miscast movie. But Cruise jumped at the dare. "I demand a lot of myself," he says. "I want to learn. I can't sit back. I like a challenge, so I create a lot of challenges for myself." For the actor, many of his films provide the perk of being able to test himself, master a new skill. He flew in Navy jets before making Top Gun. He played serious pool for eight weeks before The Color of Money. For Cocktail he tended bar in Manhattan. He plays a race-car driver in his next movie, Days of Thunder, a spin-off from Cruise's latest perilous hobby. But for Born on the Fourth of July he faced a different challenge: spending almost a year sporadically in a wheelchair, as Ron Kovic.
Stone, who planned the movie for more than a decade, was ready to do battle too. "Tom has the classical facial structure of an athlete, a baseball player," he says. "He's a kid off a Wheaties box. I wanted to yank the kid off that box and mess with his image -- take him to the dark side." So the kid goes off to war and sees a slaughtered Vietnamese family. In the chaos of a skirmish, he kills one of his own men. Paralyzed from the chest down, he finds his sex life over before it begins. In horrifying rants, he abuses his parents, his country and himself. This Ron is not a nice person or even, in his hippie garb, a nice-looking one. Moviegoers who expect to find the best of America in Cruise's face will instead discover a haunting mug shot of the nation's Viet Nam nightmare.