Film: A Few Good Men (1992)
Stars: Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kevin Bacon, Kevin Pollak, James Marshall, JT Walsh, Kiefer Sutherland
Director: Rob Reiner
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Picture, Supporting Actor-Jack Nicholson, Editing, Sound)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars
Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema. This month, our focus is on Tom Cruise: click here to learn more about Mr. Cruise (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.
Last week we talked about the marriage between Cruise & Nicole Kidman, probably the most important celebrity marriage of the 1990's. But by 2001, Cruise and Kidman were on the rocks, and divorced. This led to a lot of public retribution about Cruise himself, and his public image. Cruise is famously guarded about his private life (look at him in interviews, and he might be the most media-trained actor in the business), but the Kidman divorce took a toll on Cruise's public image. Kidman was having a major moment herself, with the successes (critical & commercial) of The Others, Moulin Rouge!, The Hours, & Cold Mountain, and was winning the breakup while Cruise was enduring rumors about why the marriage ended. They ranged from things that were eventually disproven (allegations that Cruise dumped Kidman after she suffered a miscarriage turned out to be untrue according to the actress in a 2007 interview), to ones that persist still. Cruise sued a gay porn star for stating that they had had a relationship during his marriage to Kidman, one of several lawsuits that Cruise waged where the actor pushed back on long-standing rumors that he is gay. But the most lasting rumor about Cruise's relationship ending with Kidman was around his involvement in Scientology, which does link back to A Few Good Men, because it came out the year that he first publicly announced (to Barbara Walters) that he was a follower of the controversial religion.
(Spoilers Ahead) We'll talk a bit about scientology in a second, but I don't want to totally neglect the movie at hand, as it's a rather important one for a blog that focuses on the Academy Awards, as it was up for four Oscars, including Best Picture. A Few Good Men is a movie about a military private named William Santiago who dies in the middle of the night at Guantanamo Bay after being harassed by two members of his unit who are being tried for murder. It turns out that there were pushes to have Santiago moved to a different unit but they were stopped by Colonel Nathan Jessup (Nicholson), who becomes something of a central figure in the investigation being conducted by JAG Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee (Cruise) and his commanding officer Lt. Commander Joanne Galloway (Moore). The two find out, through a lot of friction in terms of their styles (he's a rebel, she's by-the-book...imagine which one the script prefers!) that Jessup essentially ordered a "code red" which is a violent (illegal) punishment of a military officer as a way to punish them for misbehaving. This leads to Jessup being arrested for his involvement in the crime, and the two men who carried it out being dishonorably discharged.
A Few Good Men is most famous for the courtroom scene at the end of the movie between Nicholson & Cruise where Cruise proclaims "I want the truth!" and Nicholson retorts back "you can't handle the truth!" There's a reason that this is the most famous scene in the movie-it's far-and-away the best in the picture, a movie that until this point doesn't really sing. Despite having a lot of famous actors, Aaron Sorkin's script doesn't give them enough to do, and in particular underwrites Demi Moore's character to the point of problematic. Her part is unbelievably sexist in the way it's approached not just by every man in the movie, but also by the way that he makes her so two-dimensional & incompetent (Sorkin is famously bad at writing women...that's the case here too). It makes the film both heavy-handed and a bit silly, with Cruise constantly needing to prove Moore wrong. But the courtroom scene...wow. Nicholson got an Oscar nomination probably just from that scene alone, and it's totally worth it.
As I said above, A Few Good Men was a critical & commercial success, and one in a long stretch for Cruise during this era. But it was during these years that his most defining celebrity quality would emerge, that of being an advocate for Scientology. The secretive nature of the religion & its many controversies (not just in its beliefs, but in the way that it uses its members' financial assets & has levels of membership that seem to value celebrity members) have made it a black mark on Cruise's persona (and also the source of much litigation, so I'm watching my words carefully here). By the late aughts, he had largely stopped talking about it publicly even though by all accounts he is still a member of the church, but rumors persist that he was (allegedly) pushed to end his relationship with not just Kidman, but future wife Katie Holmes (whose daughter with Cruise, Suri, again allegedly has no contact with her father) and future girlfriend Ana de Armas because they would not join the church. Cruise has spent much of his career being one of the America's most loved movie stars, but pretty much every conversation about Cruise comes with an asterisk: his involvement with Scientology is a huge point of contention in an otherwise manically curated public persona.
No comments:
Post a Comment