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Yet he can be as distant as he is pleasant, as guarded as he is engaged, his very politeness a kind of barrier. His steadfast allegiance to the controversial Church of Scientology, his surprising split a year ago from Nicole Kidman, the gay rumors (and his diligent litigation in response) serve to remind us that despite all the ink spilled and all the gossip milled over the past two decades, Cruise remains someone about whom we have never quite been able to connect the dots.
To draw similarities between the actor and John Anderton, his complex, haunted character in Minority Report, is irresistible. In Spielberg's sci-fi mystery, Cruise stars as a seemingly stalwart cop in 2054 who heads an elite squad known as Precrime. Using a trio of psychic mutants called precogs, he can detect a murder before it happens, strap on a jet pack, then arrest the would-be perpetrator. But Anderton leads a double life, scoring a drug called neuroin in dark alleys, seeking oblivion after the unraveling of his family. Based on a 1956 short story by Philip K. Dick, the movie takes off when Anderton is accused of a future murder and goes on the run.
Cruise not only brought the story to Spielberg but also tapped into his most harrowing fears as a parent. The father of an adopted son, 7, and daughter, 9, Cruise said Anderton should have a son who was missing. "Tom came up with that to give the character complicated emotional baggage," says Spielberg, who confesses that he "had much more of a popcorn movie in mind until I began to think about the ramifications of arresting people without due process." The director says it was his friend Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian, who alerted him to the constitutional problems of Precrime. "She said, 'This would be a wonderful thing,'" recalls Spielberg, "'but what about the Bill of Rights?'"
Although Cruise and Spielberg, friends for two decades, have been developing the script since 1999, the movie turns out to be topical, a celluloid mirror of current events. Jointly financed by DreamWorks and Fox, it opens amid controversy over Attorney General John Ashcroft's decision to put a terrorism suspect in military detention. Many have noted the similarity between the movie's idea of Precrime and the legal ramifications of arresting but not charging suspected terrorists.
The timing for Cruise couldn't be better. Minority Report is a smart move for him at this point in his career--an edgy, mind-bending piece of film noir in the vein of Memento and The Matrix. Cruise's audience is vast, but like him, it's getting older. It's the Matrix generation that he needs to capture if he is to remain top gun at the box office. Driving toward Hollywood, he shrugs off a question about his aging demographic. "I'm getting older," he says. "But a story is a story, and a character's a character. That's what I think about."