Masculinity and Film Performance by Donna Peberdy

Author:Donna Peberdy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780230308749
Publisher: palgrave macmillan

Cruise gives the kinds of performances conventionally expected of a male lead, emoting much less than the other actors around him. He tends to react, to be the still center around whom things happen, the initiator of action, about whom the audience does not give much thought because none is necessary. This kind of film actor traditionally performs ‘naturally’; that is, his acting is disciplined and minimal in its movement. Thus it does not call attention to itself.33

Cruise’s performance in Magnolia is certainly a departure from this established persona. It is a performance that explicitly calls attention to itself. There seems to be nothing natural about the performance, it is stagy, theatrical, wild and excessive; a performance consolidated by the raucous whoops and cheers of the male diegetic audience and reaffirmed in his histrionic cries for his dying father. Conversely, others have viewed his performance of Frank T. J. Mackey as a parody or culmination of all his previous roles and characters: the performative, ‘exhibitionist masculinity’ described by Studlar; the gleaming toothy smile; the cocky, self-assured, over-confidence; the transition from boy to man. Critics saw his performance as ‘an outrageous parody of the pumped-up roles he played in Cocktail and Top Gun’ and ‘a scorching critique of his other performances’.34 Their comments imply the actor’s role in the construction of his screen persona, demonstrating a self-conscious awareness of who or what ‘Tom Cruise’ is and playing with that construction and image.

Cruise’s performance in Magnolia has also been discussed as somehow more ‘real’, less performative than earlier roles. On The Charlie Rose Show, Alec Baldwin commented, ‘if I had seen Tom Cruise only play the range that he is typically asked to play, in big-budget studio films, I might not have the same opinion I have of him as when I saw Tom Cruise take off that mask and do Magnolia’.35 Cruise’s performance in Magnolia can thus be considered alongside Michael Douglas’s ‘wiping off’ of his star persona (see Chapter 2) and yet while Douglas’s ‘wiping off’ was an attempt to display his ordinariness, it is Cruise’s mask here that is perceived as ordinary, suppressing an extraordinary and uncharacteristic personality. The notion of masks not only play a part in the construction of Frank as a mask hiding Jack, the ‘real’ man underneath, but are key to understanding Cruise’s star persona and, as Bingham notes, masks were a recurring feature of Cruise’s film repertoire in the late 1990s and early 2000s. ‘It is as if Cruise were dramatizing a desire to obscure his famous face’, he argues, ‘to cover it, and to acknowledge it as a meaningless façade, a hindrance to expression’.36 This idea is taken literally in Vanilla Sky (2001) with Cruise’s character, David Aames, wearing a prosthetic face plate to cover his supposedly disfigured face and the actor is virtually unrecognisable as a bald, overweight studio executive in Tropic Thunder (2008). While the masks in Vanilla Sky and Tropic Thunder are literal, Magnolia utilises masks figuratively, hiding the ‘real’

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