Two of pop culture’s most sincerity-challenged media titans, Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise, sat down for a powwow on Friday’s “Oprah,” the first of two episodes focused on the 25th anniversary of Cruise’s breakthrough role in “Risky Business.”
It was their first sitdown since 2005’s infamous couch-jumping incident, but if you were expecting tough questions or genuine revelations, forget it: Cruise talking to Oprah is like Dick Cheney sitting down with Fox News — an exercise in spin and softball questions.
But oh, “Risky Business.” Like Cruise’s Joel Goodsen character, I was a high school senior when the film hit theaters in August 1983, and I related to his anxieties, from pleasing his parents by getting accepted to a top-level college to stalling out the family car when driving a stick-shift in reverse. The scene where Cruise lip-syncs to “Old Time Rock ‘n Roll” became an iconic movie moment, and it — like the entire film — reveals Cruise to be a funny and charismatic performer. He also comes off as an actual human being, and that’s a talent he seems to have lost along the way.
Where’s the risk these days?Watching him talk to Oprah on the couch in his sumptuous Telluride, Colo., retreat, one is reminded how calculated and unspontaneous a public figure Cruise has become. Even when he’s trying to come off like a regular Joe, it always feels like he’s trying too hard. Whether it’s the overbearing laugh that feels fake or the let’s-hop-on-my-motorcycles routine he likes pulling with magazine profile writers, Cruise’s P.R. mode always smacks of the guy who’s trying to sell you a timeshare.
But he’s one of Oprah’s pets — one day someone’s going to write a doctoral thesis about Miss Winfrey’s attachment to Scientologists like Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kirstie Alley — so everything that comes out of her mouth is a set-up question for him to absolve himself of any recent weirdness. Most of their interview allows him to clean up the messes he made (jumping on the couch, excoriating Brooke Shields, that awkward Matt Lauer interview) during that period when Cruise’s sister was acting as his publicist.
Oprah’s question about the Lauer incident, for example, mentioned Cruise’s feelings about anti-depressants but conveniently left out the part where Cruise accused Lauer of glibness and of not having researched the subject as extensively as he, Cruise, had. And in bringing up the leaked Scientology clip that was all over YouTube, the one where Cruise talks about how Scientologists know they have to pull over for a car accident because they’re the “only ones who can help,” Oprah immediately mentions that the clip was “obviously” extensively edited, thus allowing Cruise to skirt the creepier implications of his comments.
But it’s not like Oprah doesn’t live in her own little bubble universe as well. Upon seeing the enormous, restaurant-sized kitchen in the Cruise mountain house, she exclaims, “It’s so normal!” When they discuss the problems of being pursued by the paparazzi, it’s impossible for her to be remotely objective since she, too, is a TMZ target. (How Oprah talks about subjects like this and about how chummy she is with celebrities while still appearing empathetic to middle-class women everywhere should get its own doctorate thesis.) And when they cozy up in the living room, Oprah notes how it’s often so difficult to have a “real” conversation in front of a studio audience, as if the two of them were having a “real” chat in front of a camera crew.
Still trying to take chances with movie roles
Watching Cruise do an interview inevitably reminds me of a similar scene in “Magnolia,” where his character is confronted on camera about his estranged family, and it reminds me that no matter how artificial and contrived Cruise appears in managing his public image, he still makes interesting choices as an actor.
Yes, he made “Cocktail” — and the fact that he had his script for that film bound in leather was one of the comedic highlights of Oprah’s tour of his house — but this is a guy who has gone out of his way to work with filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, John Woo, Brian DePalma, Neil Jordan and Sydney Pollack. For every sequel and Steven Spielberg flick Cruise has done for the money, there’s a bold choice that few of his thespian peers would have dared to make.
While “Lions for Lambs” was a talky dud, for example, I think Cruise’s decision to play a slick and untrustworthy politician was the perfect role to take on after much of the public turned his back on him in the wake of his criticism of Brooke Shields. His upcoming cameo in “Tropic Thunder” is already getting raves as a surprising and funny change of pace for the actor, and even if “Valkyrie” lives up to its terrible buzz, you can’t accuse Cruise of playing it safe by taking a role as a one-eyed Nazi.
Probably the truest thing to come out of Cruise’s mouth during Friday’s interview was his observation about how the press handles his beliefs in Scientology, when he noted that not talking about it was construed as avoiding the issue, while talking about it was “preaching.” It’s the same tricky balance that other celebs have had to figure out when talking about spirituality, politics, the environment and any number of other touchy subjects.
But the real balance that Cruise has yet to accomplish is giving interviews without coming off as the showbiz equivalent to that smoothly shifty politico in “Lions for Lambs.” Maybe opening up to someone who will ask tougher questions than Oprah might help.