A Life Through Film #042: Jerry Maguire

Tom Cruise, spiritually adrift, finds one of his most iconic roles ever

Release Date: 12/13/1996

Weeks at Number One: 2

Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!

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For a very brief window of time, Tom Cruise nearly escaped the Church of Scientology.

It’s bizarre to think about now. The A-Lister has been Hubbard’s most prominent disciple that isn’t named Miscavige for the past two decades now after initially joining the Church in the late ‘80s. Cruise claims that Scientology cured his dyslexia, and former church insiders have clued us into the lavish treatment heaped on the actor whenever he came to visit their headquarters (often at the expense of the rank-and-file believers who were instructed to never look at him). By 2004, the Mission: Impossible star was drowning in the Kool-Aid, espousing his enthusiasm for Scientology in an interview with Rolling Stone:

Some people, well, if they don't like Scientology, well, then fuck you. Really, fuck you. Period.

Like all true believers though, at one point Cruise faced serious doubts that sent him astray from the flock. Specifically, it was when the actor, at this point seven years deep into his study of Dianetics, was finally let into the actual secret beliefs of Scientology. Xenu, alien spaceships, the Galactic Confederacy, all the stuff South Park brought to public attention in 2005 with a handy reminder of “THIS IS WHAT SCIENTOLOGISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE” plastered across the screen.

Evidently, the elders of Scientology don’t like letting people in on the core beliefs of Hubbard’s writings until they’ve invested many years and plenty of cash into their dogma. When Cruise was enlightened to the existence of Xenu and the origin of thetans some time in the mid 1990s, the actor did not react well. He reportedly called it “science fiction shit” and retreated from the church, despite having formed a close friendship with head of Scientology David Miscavige.

For those who care, Cruise’s prodigal period is often defined by Eyes Wide Shut, the movie he spent two years making in Europe with then-wife Nicole Kidman and legendary director Stanley Kubrick. But we’re not there yet (believe it or not, Kubrick’s final masterpiece was commercially successful enough that we’ll cover it in this column some day). Just before his work on Eyes Wide Shut began, Cruise, possibly still rattled from religious revelation, was sent the script for a movie that called for him to play totally against type.

The screenplay called for a man disillusioned with the life he had built for himself for over the previous decade, despite his bountiful professional success. He would suffer setback after setback in his quest to rebuild something purer, simpler, closer to the reason he had started that line of work in the first place. Despite the doubt and the worry, he would eventually find that happiness again.

This script was about a fictional sports agent, but Cruise cried after reading it the first time. Here was a project that spoke to the turmoil of his life at that moment, courtesy of Cameron Crowe.

If someone came up to me and said that they thought that Jerry Maguire was the defining movie of 1996, I could maybe see their point. It was a massive critical and commercial hit with a great cast and a script full of lines that get quoted to this day. At its core, the movie is about the personal dissatisfaction that can come with playing the corporate game of late capitalism. I can see it! Personally, I think declaring this the definitive film of that year is too dismissive of Independence Day or even Twister, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The story of Jerry Maguire is thus: our title character (Cruise) is a 35-year-old sports agent at a big agency that represents hundreds of clients. After years of success, Maguire faces a crisis of professional faith and distributes a 25 page mission statement to his colleagues, advocating for fewer clients, less money, and more personal connection. He’s summarily fired, only managing to retain one client, undervalued Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.), and one fellow employee, a 26-year-old single mother with a huge crush on him (Renée Zellweger). Maguire struggles to rebuild his professional and personal life from there, while trying to stay true to his new values.

Despite its prominence in general movie culture, I had never watched Jerry Maguire before this week. As my initial research of the film swirled around in my mind with what I knew about its writer/director, I kept coming back to one question.

Why a sports agent?

Cameron Crowe has never been a stranger to reinvention. A teenage writing prodigy who got his start profiling rock stars for Rolling Stone in the ‘70s, he eventually got disillusioned with bloated narcissists he was professionally obligated to spend time with.¹ Using a growing interest in regular people, Crowe wrote his only novel, 1981’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. When the adaptation rights for the book were picked up, its author proved the cheapest option for a screenplay. Thus, a film career was born, one that allowed the former journalist to contribute two different entries to the venerable canon of 1980s teen movies.

Crowe was 31 when he made 1989’s Say Anything…, one of those seminal ‘80s coming of age flicks that a lot of people know about because of an iconic moment but haven’t actually seen. I get it, I’m like that with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, ironically enough.

I promise, Say Anything… is more than just John Cusack holding up a boombox, hoping that Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” is enough to win Ione Skye back. It was one of the first movies I watched this year, and I was blown away by how much I enjoyed it. Sweet, surprisingly clever and emotional, and of course buoyed by Crowe’s penchant for charming humor and great soundtracks. Say Anything… is worth seeking out [4.5/5].

The young Crowe followed that up with Singles in 1992, a Gen X rom com that I always get mixed up with Reality Bites in my head (which is so funny because I haven’t even seen Singles! Reality Bites is okay [3/5]). So far in his career, his movies hadn’t been big commercial hits, but critical darlings and cult curios that made just enough to turn a small profit. This lined up with Crowe’s “value of normal people” philosophy, but he knew it was time to get ambitious. He had written Singles to feel like an album, not a story. Crowe didn’t just want to write any story now, he wanted to write the story of the modern age.

As he became a filmmaker, Crowe began looking back and watching older movies for creative inspiration. Eventually, he found the work of Billy Wilder, a prolific director of both comedies and dramas from the ‘40s through the ‘60s. In a Rolling Stone piece that he wrote around the release of Jerry Maguire, Crowe has a lot of great things to say about Wilder’s broad filmography, but he zoomed in on The Apartment from 1960. The Best Picture winner was a revelation to Cameron Crowe, a beautiful exploration of the modern working man that smoothly alternates between gut busting and heart breaking.

In Rolling Stone, Crowe declared The Apartment his favorite film. I’m with Cameron on this one, incredible movie [4.5/5 for now, but that could easily tip over into a 5/5 after a rewatch]. The filmmaker wanted his own version of Wilder’s movie, a generational tale of a working stiff who must reconcile his personal morals with the grind of the corporate world. It would be a tale of “[arriving] at your greatest success through incredible failure,” as the writer himself put it.

Crowe spent three and a half years researching and writing his script, eventually landing on the subject of sports agents after seeing a photo of one with his client in the paper. It was an interesting time to examine these behind-the-scenes players.

Product endorsements and contract negotiations were obviously big deals before the ‘90s, but as the success of Space Jam earlier in the year shows, it had reached a whole new level of importance by 1996. An athlete’s value wasn’t just on the field but on the TV hawking boxes of Reeboks. Meanwhile, the contracts between teams and players were getting bigger, meaning there was more money to be made than ever even if you just got a small percentage of the bottom line. Shout out to Reddit user u/JPAnalyst, who put together this extremely helpful graph tracking the Annual NFL Salary Cap from 1994 through last year.

Crowe’s script for Jerry Maguire starts in that world of high power agency, where multi-million dollar deals are laughed about in boardrooms filled with only slight variations on the same basic white guy. The main character was originally written for Tom Hanks, but when that Tom passed to direct and star in That Thing You Do!, another prominent Thomas was contacted. Everyone told Crowe that Cruise would never stoop to playing a loser like Maguire. Crowe sent him a script anyway.

After reading through Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise dried his tears and called Crowe to express how much he loved the part and would be honored to play it. Despite being one of the biggest movie stars in the world for a decade at this point, he still insisted on coming in to audition for the film. Two months later, after frequent phone calls with Crowe refining the character and his own personal research into the world of sports agency, Cruise officially signed on to star in Jerry Maguire, the kind of star power that secured the project major studio distribution and a production budget of $50 million.

Both director and star had found an outlet for their evolving lives. Each man wanted to learn how to reset themselves in ways that better matched their shifting values. As a narrative exploration of seeking new success through failure, Jerry Maguire would end up being a passion project for both Crowe and Cruise. Each man wholly dedicated themselves towards the project, even as the star prepared for Eyes Wide Shut.

The final result has all the thematic elements that Crowe sought to explore and is buoyed by some top notch performances. And yet, I can’t help but stand at arm’s length from Jerry Maguire. Its attempt at being the definitive working man narrative for the end of the 20th century is admirable but heavy-handed. Plus, its dedication to cramming as many cameos and sports references into its scenes as possible makes it difficult for me to get as emotionally invested in Jerry’s story as its filmmaker and star would have liked.

None of that disconnect comes from the performances, because they’re all great. I’ve seen criticism’s of Cruise as an actor that he relies on the same blank, energetic charisma in all of his movies. I disagree. New case in point: Jerry Maguire. It isn’t as much of a stylistic departure as some of his later work, but the star uses some familiar techniques to convey an entirely new kind of figure.

Cruise utilizes a lot of the same exuberance and passion that you might see him use in Top Gun [3/5] or A Few Good Men [4.5/5]. Here though, we are not watching the usual Tom Cruise character, which can usually be described as The World’s Most Confident Man Trying To Save the World. That wide smile, that almost manic energy, the ability to get all the eyes in the room on him, none of that usual Tom Cruise stuff is used to make you think that Jerry Maguire is a guy on top of his game.

Instead, to borrow a modern turn of phrase, the movie is one extended crashout from our title character. Within five minutes of the movie starting, Jerry has suffered an existential crisis that will cause him to eventually lose his job, fiancée, professional prospects, and self-confidence. Just when you think it couldn’t get worse for Maguire, it somehow does. He starts drinking. He has to convince Rod Tidwell not to leave him again. His relationship with Zellwegger’s character evolves in an unhealthy way. These stumbles to rock bottom start off as hilarious, but as these missteps become more emotional, they become subtler in tone but equally devastating in result.

Suddenly, the actor’s ability to get all eyes on him isn’t a blessing, it’s a curse. Everyone is watching Jerry stumble and fall over and over again because you just can’t look away from this dude.

Cruise simultaneously uses the acting tools he was already known for and enhances his performance as Jerry by incorporating subtle shifts in his body language. Ethan Hunt would never trip and fall while trying to quickly walk through an office. Maverick wouldn’t be caught dead fidgeting uncomfortably as others make fun of his personality. Jerry Maguire, though, oozes insecurity in his movements and in his performative overcompensation. That hollow smile is now the grin of a man who is holding onto his sanity by a single thread. Surprise surprise, Tom Cruise is a good actor.

Crowe wanted to cast lesser known actors around Cruise to make the leading man feel more like a human being. That never really pans out, this is Tom Cruise after all. But it does lead to Jerry Maguire having a supporting cast full of killer, breakout talent. Cuba Gooding Jr. and Renée Zellweger are the most obvious beneficiaries of this level of exposure. Not only do both young actors, each early in their respective careers, hold their ground when acting against Cruise, oftentimes they surpass him.

Gooding in particular is spectacular as Rod Tidwell. Honestly, you get the sense that an entire other movie is happening where he is the protagonist and Jerry Maguire is a side character with a weirdly profound arc. I’d watch the hell out of that movie, personally. Tidwell is high energy in private but resents having to play the media and networking game of being an NFL player. Unlike Jerry, he knows exactly who he is, and yet Rod still suffers professionally because of his unwillingness to be what others want. Gooding is often hilarious, but when his character quiets down he also knows how to sell his discontentment and anger.

Renée Zellweger, in her first major motion picture, steals many a scene as Jerry’s love interest, Dorothy. Even when I didn’t fully follow her character’s logic, Zellweger always made Dorothy feel like a real, charming person. I found myself rooting for her throughout Jerry Maguire, even as she made extremely boneheaded decisions like loudly declaring her love for Jerry after their first date or even agreeing to leave her job for him in the first place with a young son at home.

Bonnie Hunt, Jay Mohr, Jerry O’Connell, Regina King, and young Jonathan Lipnicki fill out the space around those main three characters. You may not recognize all of those names right off the bat, but Jerry Maguire is an incredible “Oh shit, they’re in this?” kind of movie. Some of these performers, like King, would go on to have noteworthy careers in the years ahead. Others, like Lipnicki, are a welcome artefact of a bygone era. All turn in great performances, whether they see Jerry as friend or foe.

It helps that the movie’s talented cast is given some very fun dialogue to chew on. Some of the more iconic lines, like “Show me the money” and “You had me at hello,” linger on in the public consciousness for good reason, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I found myself laughing during the first half of Jerry Maguire where the movie is basically just a hilarious comedy.

Did you know that this movie makes Tom Cruise shout “I LOVE BLACK PEOPLE!” over a phone multiple times as a bit? Everyone should know that. It should be an iconic moment in his career, as momentous as the rappel heist from Mission: Impossible or the cross examination of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.

This all sounds like a great time right? I’d argue it’s merely a good one.

In his newfound fandom for Billy Wilder, Crowe decided to ask the aged writer/director of The Apartment if he’d consider coming in to film a small but important role as Maguire’s old mentor. Crowe and Cruise spent 45 minutes explaining the plot of the movie, its meaning, and the character’s arc to Wilder, who asked a single question that gets at the heart of why I can’t get myself to love this movie.

“But why do we care about Jerry Maguire in the first place?”

I have no trouble relating to spies, superheroes, defense attorneys, or even the occasional slasher villain. Empathy for fictional characters outside my own lived experiences is not normally an issue. I’m game to walk a mile in basically any shoes. And yet the two hour spiral into successive rock bottom after rock bottom that is Jerry Maguire remained difficult for me to get invested in for a silly, personal reason.

I’m not a sports guy. And Jerry Maguire leverages a lot of its filmmaking decisions assuming that not only are you tapped into general sports fandom of the mid 90s, you’re in so deep that you care about player contracts and endorsement deals. If you are that kind of person, good news. Crowe used the connections of his technical advisor, actual long-time sport agent Leigh Steinberg, to fill the busier moments of Jerry Maguire to the gills with cameos from prominent athletes and coaches from the time, most of whom maybe get one speaking line and none of whom I recognized.²

Though it’s an overall funny film, Jerry Maguire also feels the need to cram a few too many timely pop culture references into its script, such as when Jerry freaks out at sexually harassing Dorothy like he’s Clarence Thomas, or when an ignorant kid mistakenly calls Tidwell Hootie (from “And the Blowfish” fame). This isn’t bad inherently, and I understand what the jokes are. I just find it an interesting choice to make given Crowe’s goal with the film.

It’s visually obvious that The Apartment is from 1960, yes, and there are cultural things about relationships and working that its plot touches on that just aren’t huge concerns anymore. Yet the movie remains highly relatable despite this. The core of the movie is urban loneliness and losing yourself in pursuit of the grind. It tells a thoroughly modern story that doesn’t hammer you over the head with jokes referencing the fact that it is currently 1960. The Apartment is timeless, emotionally effective filmmaking. Jerry Maguire almost constantly screams 1996.

So Crowe failed to make an updated version of his favorite movie. He also failed to make a movie with a compelling, driving narrative.

Don’t get me wrong, Jerry Maguire has a beginning, middle, and end, and a couple of its characters even change from opening to closing credits. But it’s clear that Crowe is more interested in making interesting scenes rather than tying those moments together to create a great, propulsive plot.

“Show me the money!” is a great motivator for Jerry and Rod’s relationship, but we never see Jerry doing all that much to that end, even as Tidwell remains his only client. Similarly, the romantic arc between Jerry and Dorothy is mostly fine, but lacks clear definition even by the lovely resolution at the end. I know Crowe can write a compelling, complicated romance. Instead, what he created here is far from the young love journey of Say Anything….

All this is to say that Jerry Maguire is more of a vibes movie than I thought it should be, especially in the second half. Important questions are just never answered: why is Jerry fired for thinking that there should be some changes to his industry? What do sports agents really do for their clients? What’s the deal with Kelly Preston’s character, Maguire’s ex-fiancée whose character remains baffling in almost every way to me?

I love a good vibes movie when the filmmaker knows that that’s what they’re making; Linklater is potentially my favorite at it, even if just for the double feature of Dazed & Confused [4.5/5] and Boyhood [4/5]. Yet Crowe shoots Jerry Maguire like a high tension thriller enough to make me believe that I was supposed to find vague phone calls and the presence of a football player I didn’t recognize to be huge dramatic twists.

This isn’t to say that Jerry Maguire is a badly written movie. I find its explorations of personal value and compromise to be compelling to watch on screen, especially when it's carried by such all-around killer performances. If you’re like me and you’ve never seen the movie before, I think it’s worth checking out so you can get full context on all those quotes you’ve been hearing from it second-hand. Watch The Apartment first though, and then temper your expectations for Jerry Maguire, given the lofty goals of Crowe and Cruise.

Everything I’ve read about the movie indicates that director and star were both positively thrilled with the final result. Crowe tells a great story in that Rolling Stone piece about Cruise excitingly bringing all his family and friends to a private screening of the director’s first cut of Jerry Maguire. The actor, perhaps seeking validation of his own ability and moral decisions in the absence of his guiding faith, adored the film. He pulled Crowe aside after credits had rolled and told him it was the best role he’d ever played.

Then, Cruise was off to Europe. Kubrick awaited.

Critics were equally effusive. Jerry Maguire currently holds an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, indicating high acclaim across the board. Mike Clark from USA Today gave the film nearly full marks and highlighted the brilliant supporting cast around Cruise. Marjorie Baumgarten at The Austin Chronicle was as happy with the film as she was proud of local icon Zellwegger, complimenting the “depth of humanity” that Cruise is surprisingly able to plunge into.

Meanwhile, G. Allen Johnson from the San Francisco Examiner was less impressed:

This is one of those mainstream America films that revels in posing a great Moral Question (in this case: Should I be a good person?), then pats itself on the back for answering it correctly.

Jerry Maguire was without a doubt the biggest commercial hit to be a heavy hitter come awards time. The list of awards the film was nominated for and won takes up a larger chunk of its Wikipedia page than the plot summary, so let’s just focus on the big ones. At the Oscars that March, the movie was nominated for 5 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Tom Cruise was up for Best Actor too, but the only award the movie won was Best Supporting Actor, which went to Cuba Gooding Jr. I give his speech 4.5/5.

There’s a good chance audiences in 1996 would have gone to the theater to watch footage of Tom Cruise steeping a mug of English Breakfast to the tune of an $11 million opening weekend, so Crowe and crew surely knew that Jerry Maguire would be a hit. But the movie pulled in $17 million just in its release weekend, almost as much as Say Anything… made in its entire theatrical run. From there, Jerry Maguire stayed in the Top 10 of the box office charts for so long that it actually climbed back to Number One during its seventh week of release. By that point, it had already made over $100 million.

An awards season bump later that winter kept the momentum going, meaning the movie didn’t start slipping down into the double digits of the charts until March of ‘97. The movie, already a monster hit by this point, kept filling theaters. By the time the last movie houses finally stopped showing Jerry Maguire, it was the Fourth of July weekend, and the film had done a final domestic gross of $153 million.

The international market, usually uncaring towards American sports movies, came out in a big way, contributing $119 million towards the final gross of $273 million. Cameron Crowe’s first attempt at a major motion picture turned out to be the 4th highest grossing film of 1996, right below Mission: Impossible and right above Ransom.

Does the success of Jerry Maguire speak to mass professional dissatisfaction in 1996 and 1997? Statistically, not really. According to a 2014 Vox article that cites The Conference Board, overall job satisfaction in the mid ‘90s was quite high, hovering close to 60%. Over the next decade, it would drop to under 50%. It’s weird to say, but people generally liked their jobs back then. “Work sucks, I know” was more prophetic of Blink-182 than reflective.

Jerry Maguire touches on enough modern philosophical questions about the nature of work, profit, and morality that the movie is ultimately intellectually stimulating, but it’s also a funny, charming film where Tom Cruise gets to play a schmuck for the first time since maybe Risky Business [4/5] . It’s got a great cast and a heartfelt message, even if actually watching it can be a bit boring in the second half. Sometimes, movies are hits because they’re good crowd pleasers. Jerry Maguire was never going to capture the teenage audience of Independence Day, but as far as grown up movies go, you couldn’t ask for more broad appeal.

Cameron Crowe has been talking about plans for a sequel to Jerry Maguire for literal decades now. I’ll go ahead and guess that it’s never going to happen. I’m sure Crowe could write a compelling contemporary narrative for the character, but I also know he could explore those ideas with a wholly original idea as well. Jerry Maguire Jr. or whatever doesn’t need to exist, so it’s good that it probably never will.

Crowe built his connection with this story over years of research and reflection in an effort to emulate a master of the filmmaking craft. Cruise discovered his after receiving an emotional bombshell of a script one day in the mail. Both men put their all into Jerry Maguire and were rewarded handsomely for it. I don’t love the movie all in all, but you can tell that this is not a movie made by committee. Jerry Maguire attempts to capture the discontent of the working stiff and maybe tries to be too specific with it. I still had a good time watching it.

Cruise would eventually find himself back to Scientology, but he’s got a hell of a movie to make with Kubrick before he does. We’ll get to that, plus one more collaboration between Cruise and Crowe, in future entries of this column.

Rating: 3.5/5

Works Cited

What Else Was In Theaters? Tim Burton’s tongue-in-cheek ensemble shlock fest, Mars Attacks!, came out the same day as Jerry Maguire. Fun movie! 3.5/5

Next Week: Does it suck? Or does it rule? Gen X, we’re gonna figure it out together. Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, and they’re making it everybody else’s problem.

See you then!

-Will

1. For more on this phase of Crowe’s life, please see 2000’s Almost Famous, a fictional retelling of this era of his life and an incredible movie to boot. 4.5/5

2. Interestingly, Jerry Maguire is credited as being based on the life of Steinberg on Wikipedia. While Crowe did follow the guy around for a couple of years for research, I’ve never gotten the sense in the interviews Steinberg has done that he ever went through any of the kind of turmoil that Maguire does in the film.