Acting Like A Boss: Tom Cruise continues to woo, stand and shoot

It’s quite a thing, being able to hang precariously, and stylishly, off the wing of a taxing plane, for an ageing agent. Not only does Cruise (playing superspy Ethan Hunt for the fifth time in 19 years) manage to get in, he also grins at a foxed fellow while leaping back out into the blue. That’s a toughie all right, but the most impossible mission of them all — in the frenetic shooting, and chasing, and racing — is to make us believe. Do I know that the latest instalment of Cruise’s most famous franchise is a movie, and everyone in it is faking it? Of course. Do I believe that he can scale up the highest building in the world? Hell yeah.

Back in the late ’80s, everyone, and I mean literally everyone from the age of 18 to 80, took to wearing a specific brand of Ray-Ban dark glasses. They were hard to come by in India those days, but you could spot any number of people, mostly young men, who swaggered around trying for the Cruise brand of cool, post his smash-hit Top Gun.

That was the film that really made him a global top gun, the kind who gets to have parts written for them, or the firepower to bankroll a franchise. He plays a pilot in the ’86 blockbuster, striding down the runway, and looping the loops, in those shades. It was not just his leading lady Kelly McGillis who fell hard. The epidemic spread far and wide.

Some actors are stars first and forever more, their ability to carry a scene never at odds with their “acting skills”. So many times I’ve been asked for a Bollywood equivalent, and, of course, it is clearly Shah Rukh Khan. Both have coasted on charm and charisma, and both can act if they want to, but they don’t necessarily need to, because they have that elusive quality that most people kill for: owning the spotlight.

That is the quality that lets us forgive, even if we cannot forget. Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah Winfrey’s sofa, on prime-time TV, shouting out his love for then girl-friend Katie Holmes, was a moment. It became much bigger than it should have, simply because sometimes these things quite inexplicably take on a life of their own, especially in these technology-driven, celeb-obsessed times.

A superstar jumping up and down on a couch, and not just any old couch, but on the queen of the confessional chat show’s famous prop was always going to be news. In the normal course, it would have made a splash in a few tabloids, and been forgotten. But YouTube had just come up, and someone uploaded the sequence, and the world watched agape. There was so much derision that it threatened to wipe out, in the words of a US newspaper “our last great movie star”.

But the movie gods loved Cruise. By then, he had already exhibited a great connect with the most fickle thing on the planet: the audience, which kept coming back for more, despite his duds. Because he had already made us look, and look hard, at his characters, which never strayed far from the Cruise persona, but which managed to resonate: as the brother of the autistic genius played by Dustin Hoffman in Rainman, and as the paralysed Vietnam war veteran in Born On The Fourth Of July.

He’s continued to woo us in movies that play to his core competencies: he can kick butt, he can pull the trigger while falling sideways (an absolute must-have quality for an action hero), and, yes, he can romance the lovelies. One of my favourite parts is the sports agent he plays in Jerry Maguire, in which he abandons greed and stands up for the good. That’s what we want our heroes to do.

Unlike the other uber-talented Tom (Hanks), whose regular Joe-ness took him down an entirely different curve in terms of parts and films, Cruise’s matinee idol looks have always been to the fore, and it is to his credit that he became, at a stage, willing to be less pretty. And took on parts which allowed him grunge, even though they didn’t always work, like the dark, dystopian War Of The World.

For a movie star like Cruise who has stayed the journey for over 30 years, the blips go off the radar. What remains is the ability to remain standing. And shooting.