Cinema: Tom Terrific

In his fiery new film, Hollywood's top gun aims for best-actor status

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Top Gun proved that Cruise could carry the right picture by himself. In The Color of Money he would see if he could stand up to a movie icon, Paul Newman, under the gaze of a world-class filmmaker, Martin Scorsese. Newman is Eddie Felson, the pool sharp he played 25 years earlier in The Hustler, and Cruise is Vincent Lauria, a comer in the art of nine ball. The movie describes two different styles of performance and personality. The old kind was grace without sweat: the whole point of Astaire's dancing, Sinatra's singing or Bogart's acting was to make hard work look easy. The new style (Gene Kelly, Elvis, Brando and all their successors in the Pop arts) was manic, sexy, a brilliant workout for the ego.

So Vincent pokes his dexterity in every side pocket while Eddie sits nearby, coiled, worldly, wise, a little affronted at the younger man's blazing cheek. This raw kid is the color of money -- green -- but at his best he radiates in- your-face star power. One sensational shot at the pool table reveals Cruise high on his own showy excellence, whooping, dervishing, twirling his pool cue like a kendo master: Luke Skystrutter. The force is with Vincent. And with Cruise.

When Eddie first spots Vincent's gift with the stick, his eyes light up. Newman might have felt the same when he noticed Cruise's determination. "He's prepared to hang himself on a meat hook," Newman observes. "He'll hang himself out to dry to seek something. He's not afraid of looking like a ninny. He doesn't protect himself or his ego. And he's a wonderful experimenter." Of course, like any actor, says Newman, "when the material is poor, he falls back on his successful mannerisms: the happy kitten. I don't know that he's a great mathematician or a theoretical physicist, but he has what he needs to be a good actor." A good student too. With Newman's encouragement, Cruise took up racing and fell in love with the sport. For a while he even drove for one of Newman's teams.

His next significant project, Rain Man, took years to get going. As a kind of vacation from responsibility, he made Cocktail, a shrewd, soulless marketing of the Cruise charisma. The star tries hard to appear engaged by the story of a young bartender seduced and frazzled by Manhattan chic. But he is just beefcake hanging in the window: smile, flirt with the ladies, shake your booty. "I tried to sell out to you," he tells a rich girlfriend, "but I couldn't close the deal." With Cocktail, Cruise closed the deal. This empty decanter grossed $175 million.

Rain Man was the third consecutive film in which Cruise played a character who could be described as the cool jerk. Charlie Babbitt is a slick salesman whose estrangement from his father has cut him off from most human contact. Emotionally, he is as autistic as his brother Raymond (Hoffman). But Cruise made character sense out of Charlie and held his own against Hoffman's brilliant stunt of a performance. "Tom's a moment-to-moment actor," Hoffman says. "He's there in the moment. He doesn't have an intellectual idea of what he wants to do -- he's coming off his gut, and that makes him a pleasure to play Ping-Pong with. I started out being his mentor. But by the end Tom was as much directing me as I was directing him."

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