On Jerry Maguire

The 69th Academy Awards were broadcast on March 24, 1997. This was still during an era when the Oscars were a big event, one of the two or three annual telecasts everyone would watch. The ratings were actually down this particular year, to around forty million viewers—an almost ten percent decrease from the previous year. The drop in viewership was widely attributed to the nominees, a lot of which were obscure to general audiences. The nominated movies included Fargo, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Shine, Sling Blade, and Secrets and Lies. Best Picture went to The English Patient, which failed to gross even $75 million domestically.

There was one fêted movie, however, that stood out in this “Year of the Indie Film.” It was the only movie from a Hollywood studio to receive any major nominations: the popular and well-reviewed Tom Cruise vehicle Jerry Maguire. I had, by that night, not seen it yet. I’m not sure I’d even heard of it, which meant I was certainly in the dark about the rest of the nominees that year. But despite not knowing any of the movies, I still watched the entire ceremony, which shows you how much cachet the Oscars had at the time.

The night began memorably, with Jerry Maguire picking up the only award it would win: Best Supporting Actor for Cuba Gooding, Jr. He took the stage and proceeded to give one of the best Oscar acceptance speeches of all time, permanently cementing an appearance in all future Oscar highlight clips. I had never heard of him up to that point, but his ebullience and display of unfettered happiness won me over as it did everyone else who was watching, both on tv at home and live in the auditorium. It was an energetic introduction to what was historically a bloated, turgid affair, the Oscars not usually offering minute-by-minute excitement.

As they continued to dole out all the awards—some of them quite obscure, with categories I still to this day don’t understand the parameters of, let alone how to judge excellence in (eg. “Best Sound” vs. “Best Sound Effects Editing”)—it slowly dawned on me that making a movie required contributions from a whole lot of people. I knew this intellectually, I suppose; how could one not when every movie ends in an interminable scroll of names? But I, like most people, had always ignored the end credits of movies, and in doing so overlooked an important point: not only were movies made by an army of people, a lot of them could be called “artists” in their own right. They all added their particular creative contributions to a final artistic product. Seeing master artists win awards in each of the disciplines a movie required changed the way I saw movies, I’m sure.

I had always respected stories. More than respected, I treasured them. From an early age they were a major component of the joy I derived from life. I remember as a young boy, maybe eight or nine years old, being a member of a mail order book club that would send books to your house every few weeks. I would be so happy when a new shipment arrived. I devoured everything they sent, and I ending up loving a lot of them. I still remember the characters and scenarios and covers of those books (though some of the titles unfortunately elude me today). I remember one time getting two books at once. One of them was part of a series featuring a recurring cast of characters who were my age and who got in little adventures that I loved reading about. As I got to know these characters better with each successive book, it was fun seeing them interact and be thrown in situations that accentuated their individual personalities. It was like hanging out with friends, so it was always a good time even though the adventures they got into were about as inconsequential as you could possibly imagine. One of them was about going to a roller rink and getting stuck with wrong-sized skates. Another one revolved around an unsuccessful attempt to bake brownies. I can’t for the life of me remember what this series was called, but I enjoyed it tremendously. The other book I got that day was about a trio of teenage boys out on their dirtbikes. It started as a frivolous day of fun, but they soon got embroiled in some thrillerish scenario, witnessing something they weren’t supposed to, or something like that. I remember a relative—I think an uncle—was over my house the day these books came in and he mentioned that the dirtbike one looked more interesting, no doubt due to the relatively serious and realistic art on the cover, which contrasted sharply with the cartoon imagery of a gang of third graders on the cover of the other book. I told him I was most looking forward to reading the one with the characters I already knew in it, though when I finished reading the dirtbike one I liked it as well. The titles of both books are just beyond my memory’s scope and so are impossible to track down today, but if I ever come across them again I know it will feel like meeting up with an old friend.

Looking back it strikes me that I tended to gravitate toward stories that were at least somewhat rooted in reality. I enjoyed outlandish stories too, going through a pretty heavy sci-fi/fantasy phase in my early teens, like every other boy seemingly did. But the ones that had characters who were my age going through relatable situations, those were the ones I liked the most, or at least they stuck with me longer than the fantastical ones did. Sometimes these stories taught me how to think about things, or defined for me the meaning or parameters of a feeling or emotion or concept. I still remember a passage in Judy Blume’s Superfudge. In it, fifth grader Peter Hatcher is going to the movies with a group of friends, with his annoying little brother, Fudge, tagging along. They run into a girl he has a crush on going to the same movie with her friends. She and Peter end up sitting next to each other in the theater. What follows is one of the most indelible pages I’ve ever read. With apologies to Mrs. Blume and her estate, I’m just going to quote it without permission here:

 

When the picture started, Joanne offered me some of her popcorn, and when I reached into the carton, our fingers touched. Then I offered her some of mine, so our fingers touched again. By that time my fingers were covered with grease, but who cared? I began to relax, concentrating more on sitting next to Joanne than on the movie, but maybe that was because I’d already seen it.

Then, right when Superman was about to kiss Lois Lane, I felt something icy cold slither down my back, and I let out a yelp.

Fudge was hanging over the back of my seat, with a handful of ice cubes from his Coke. “Hi, Pee-tah. . . .”

“You little . . .” But there was no way I could catch him. He was already racing up the aisle.

“Here . . .” Joanne said, handing me a Kleenex.

“Could you do it?” I asked. “I don’t think I can reach all the way down my back.”

Joanne mopped off my neck and then my back. And when she’d finished, she put her hand close to mine, and the next thing I knew we were holding hands. Hers was soft but cold.

When the movie ended, Joanne, Sharon and Elaine walked home in one direction, and we walked home in the other.

 

My god, you have no idea how much those 213 words wrecked me. Peter was slightly older than I was when I read the book, and at a time when I was cultivating what felt like my first meaningful crushes, it was like getting a glimpse of where it could all lead. The whole thing felt like a consummation to me. It showed me that all these dizzying feelings I would get when I looked at a girl I liked could be transformed, sublimated into physical and observable evidence of my adoration. This was as revelatory to me as anything I’d ever heard or read. Just holding hands in a darkened theater became for me the apotheosis of not just young love, but love in general. I still have a thing about holding hands; the act still retains an outsized significance for me. The way people in their twenties romanticize Gatsby is the way I’ve continued to romanticize Superfudge—or that one passage at least.

It’s dangerous, or at least foolhardy, to learn life lessons from something that’s clearly labeled “fiction.” The gleaned bits of wisdom and insight found in the words and actions of fictional characters often prove to be untenable in the real world.  Stories are dramatized and too clean to map to real life in a one-to-one correspondence sort of way. That was the thing that tripped me up the most. I find the core of a lot of what passes for emotional truths in the best fiction to be mostly accurate (or I’ve convinced myself it is anyway). But the circumstances that reveal these emotional truths are rarely replicable in real life, or require such high stakes or costly sacrifice that one doesn’t even think of copying a character’s actions. (We’ve seen characters in movies and books die for/because of love, hate, sadness, joy, fear, bravery, ambition, boredom . . . the list of feelings, emotions, qualities, and attributes a character will die for to prove they (ie. the f/e/q/a) are real is endless.) I’ve found that even a story’s low stakes scenarios—say, for example, touching a girl’s hand while reaching for popcorn at the same time—are hard to recreate in real life, at least with the same clean perfection found in fiction. Honestly, this disconnect between a story’s perfect sequencing of events and the real world’s messy, herky-jerky rhythms is one of the big reasons I write stories myself: it’s the only place I can make everything go exactly right.

So for whatever reason, be it timidity or social awkwardness or an overactive imagination or just the day-to-day of a sibling-less existence, I found myself, in these pre-internet days, turning to fiction for clarity on all the stuff I was feeling inside. I probably did it in the same spirit that people a hundred years ago had had when they read realist novels to get a sense of what Africa or India was like. Back in those times there was probably an understanding that a novel attempting to capture a geographical area would be imperfect, full of elisions and exaggerations and outright lies, but also a trust that the sense or spirit of the place would be accurate. The same sort of simulacrum-like quality all fiction has when dealing with the measurable facts of our physical world can also be present in its approach to the emotional elements in a story. Fiction will show you a representation of love and hate and grief and all of that stuff but it will usually be in a perfectly constructed form that can feel very different than experiencing those emotions out in the wild. It took me a while to learn this, because I’m the unfortunate combination of a slow learner who is also very naive. Like a person who confuses the map with the territory, I thought for the longest time that made-up stories featured exact representations of human emotions and behavior. Even when I eventually realized they didn’t, I still trusted them, and secretly harbored a belief, one that I can still tell I possess to this day, that even if a story is not the way it really is, it’s often the way it should be. And if that’s the case, then it should be something to strive for, instead of being dismissed as unrealistic. Stories hold up ideals, it’s up to us to want to live up to them. I still find myself copying the actions of characters in stories, hoping to eventually attain that idealized notion of love, courage, success, etc.

And so we come back to Jerry Maguire. Like I said, I had not seen the movie and had not been aware of its holiday season release. Its catch phrases had not yet been cemented into the culture’s lexicon, though it was a very popular movie even at that point; by the night of the Oscars it had taken in over $140 million dollars at the box office—an enormous sum, especially for a romantic comedy (it’s still the fourth highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time). Although Cuba’s win would be the movie’s only victory that night, it was nominated in most of the major categories and so was featured often throughout the broadcast. When they played a clip for its Best Picture nomination spotlight, the Oscar producers decided to cut right to the emotional high point of the movie, spoilers be damned, and they played the “You complete me/You had me at hello” scene. It was the first bit of the movie I had ever seen—a hell of a contextless introduction. And yet I was mesmerized. Despite not knowing the events leading up to this living room speech and being oblivious to the stakes involved, I felt my eyes well up as I watched this 90-second clip. I had never seen such pure emotional force compressed in such a compact way, in a scene that also felt grounded and real, not over-the-top. There was no swelling music underneath, the setting was normal, unremarkable, familiar, there were awkward pauses and interruptions (paralepsis?) and rephrasings that mimicked real speech. The whole point of the scene was an emotionally affecting expression of love and devotion that was reciprocated in front of witnesses—it didn’t get much better than that. It was love at first sight, and I needed to see the rest of the movie as soon as possible.

I rooted for Jerry Maguire for the rest of the night as another romantic powerhouse, The English Patient, swept up most of the major awards. Scenes from that movie didn’t hit me as hard, or at all even. The setting was too foreign, too remote, the actors too exotic with their accents and what struck me as prim period acting. Even now I view English Patient with a detached quality, though I appreciate its craft and romantic sweep. (Not to mention the performance of Juliette Binoche, in the running for my favorite actress.) But the remove with which I watch that movie now was amplified by a factor of one hundred back in 1997. It seemed like a staged production, English Patient did, while Jerry Maguire seemed like real life.

I had to wait two months for the VHS release of Jerry Maguire. When it came out, I immediately bought a copy and proceeded to watch it over and over again all summer. I probably averaged five viewings a week, easy. By the time I started attending college that fall, I could essentially recite the entire movie from memory verbatim. I remember being stuck in a car during orientation, waiting for a pre-scheduled event to occur with nowhere to go (a familiar burden ameliorated in the present day by internet-connected devices that were non-existent back then), and, to pass the time, I began recreating as much of the movie aloud as I could, starting with “So this is the world and there are almost six billion people on it.” I think I got as far as “These fish are coming with me” before the other person in the car told me to seriously stop or there’d be painful repercussions.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Jerry Maguire became my guide to life. I was sure the notes I took from it would help me navigate through incipient adulthood. It seemed to have so much to teach me about love, devotion, loyalty, and principled living. I practically studied it the way people study highly moral fiction like The Alchemist or A Pilgrim’s Progress or something, taking from them direction on how to live. And I wasn’t entirely wrong to do so—if you could perfectly model your life on a Cameron Crowe protagonist, full of his trademark rectitude and probity and just good guyness, you would do very well and be thought of as just a sterling example of a human being. Of course, his characters set standards we corporeal human beings could never achieve. But we oh so wanted to, and for two hours or so Crowe made his characters so relatable in their journey that you felt for sure you could be them. Which was such a trick on Crowe’s part—a generous, open-hearted trick, but a trick nonetheless. On one level, it’s easy to create “relatable” characters: just make them lovelorn, down on their luck, a bit homely or just not the most attractive people around to reflect how we see ourselves, at times, and just sit back and watch the audience ID with these characters en masse. But Crowe had us men believing we could be John Cusack, or Tom Cruise, or Orlando Bloom, or Matt Damon, et al. How did Crowe pull this off? Part of it due to his unwavering commitment to show male vulnerability on the big screen, but he also made them the slightly less glamorous characters in the movie, which gave them the illusion of being infinitely more relatable while still being super glamorous. Crowe’s protagonists were the sports agents (not the superstar athletes), the magazine editors (not the celebrities in the magazines), the reporters (not the rock stars they were covering), the shoe designers (not the people getting paid to endorse the shoe), etc. This was an important aspect of his movies, actually. It gave his films an undeniable vitality. It’s easy to create a character that looks like an everyman, it’s harder to place that character in a context and story that people would be psyched to watch and that would entertain and not depress. Crowe’s movies look good. His characters look good. He’s a slick Hollywood director, and—let’s face it—things always look better in movies bankrolled by old studio money. But the world Crowe depicts is a good one, and the lives he shows us are lives worth living. It would be fun to be a Cameron Crowe character, all the while dealing with loneliness and self-consciousness and uncertainty—all the things we recognize in ourselves and see embodied in his wonderfully flawed characters.

That I also saw in Jerry Maguire a supreme work of art is also defensible, even now after having watched a couple thousand or more movies since 1997, some of which are quite serious art indeed. The argument mainly stems from pointing out that its component parts are done at the highest level. Jerry Maguire was a high point in the career of practically every actor in it, not just Tom and Renee and Cuba, but also Jay Mohr and Bonnie Hunt and Jerry O’Connell. All of them super talented, and they have not been better before or since. The script is impeccable, introducing no fewer than four phrases into contemporary American argot (“Show me the money”; “You complete me”; “You had me at hello”; “Ambassador of Kwan”). The story’s trajectory is so finely tuned, the highs and lows so perfectly placed, that there is not a single emotion you don’t feel at the most perfect, piquant time. Crowe had essentially mastered the romantic comedy at this point, or, rather, his version of a romantic comedy, which followed its own inimitable formula. (The only part I would point to as iffy is the amount of heavy lifting the traveling montage at the end (and Paul McCartney song that plays over it) is required to do. He’d optimize his dialogue-less scenes in his next movie.) Crowe’s direction came into its own, no longer exhibiting the flaws of his earlier efforts. No more uninteresting shots that blunted the impact scenes like the Campbell Scott and Kyra Sedgewick reunion in Singles, no more neglecting to do coverage like he did on Say Anything (vide (or hear) his hilarious audio commentary with Cusack and Skye). Every funny moment in Jerry Maguire is made funnier by Crowe’s direction, every emotional moment is more emotional. (That slow dolly in on Cruise in the living room scene was powerful even in Oscar clip form, I can attest.) Every other aspect of the production was done equally well, by the most talented craftsmen and -women in the business. The production design was impeccable—I’m not sure there’s ever been as many living rooms in one movie, each with its own personality and feeling. The film was cut to frame-perfect perfection by the Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning editor. Betsy Heimann’s costumes, from the suits to casualware, were exactly what those characters would wear. Spielberg’s cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, kept everything looking as gorgeous as one thought was possible in this world, which is to say that it remained grounded: each scene looked like you would hope a scene would look if you were in that scene in real life, and it could if the sun was in the right spot, if the light hit the wet street in the right way, etc., i.e. it fit Crowe’s aesthetic: Possible, if you’re lucky.

It is because all these aspects of production were done at such a high level that I’m not kidding when I say Jerry Maguire was my gateway to viewing films as an art form. The way I viewed movies changed dramatically in 1997. Before then, I regarded them as pieces of pure entertainment. Things had to be flashy, fun, and exciting to hold my interest. Movies were pure escapism, a good time out, a theme park ride. I suppose this was true about the other things I consumed; books and tv shows had to be similarly engaging. Occasionally I’d watch a movie that was a bit deeper, that had something going on besides a motive to please. These were movies like Dances With Wolves or Forrest Gump, and were usually longer and less exciting on a minute-by-minute basis than my usual diet of cinematic delights. I didn’t mind them, but also considered them inferior to Star Wars, Back to the Future, or The Goonies, in the same way that vegetables were vastly inferior to almost any dessert. (As I write this out, I find myself thinking that, given these examples, there’s actually nothing wrong with this opinion, and today would still take those childhood loves over most of the prim “prestige” pictures whose position of moral superiority usually sucks out any sense of fun or joy or anything that makes a movie enjoyable. Not that Dances With Wolves and Forrest Gump are the most egregious examples of these kinds of self-congratulatory movies, but they definitely toe the line.) I remember the summer of 1996 being a particularly good time for escapism at the theater. My mom and dad and I went to more movies that year than we ever had previously for some reason. I figure they thought it was an inexpensive way to get out of the house instead of just staying in and renting a movie, which is something that was done every week or so. My parent’s taste at the time was aligned with mine, which is to say decidedly commercial. There were plenty of weird, interesting movies that we could’ve sought out during that time frame. On top of the Oscar-nominated indies, there was Bottle Rocket, Trainspotting, Cronenberg’s Crash, and Stealing Beauty—all movies that would eventually mean a great deal to me in the future. Instead, we saw Mission: Impossible and Twister. I also remember us going to see Executive Decision that year and my dad being bitterly disappointed that Steven Seagal dies in the opening scenes. (Seagal movies were a popular video rental at my house.) My mom took me to see The Cable Guy because I was a huge Jim Carrey fan. It was the edgiest movie I saw that whole year, but I just thought it was hilarious and made no real distinction between that and Ace Ventura. Like everyone else, I saw Independence Day, but that was with friends. I remember my English teacher making fun of that movie, particularly Bill Pullman’s rousing speech at the end that was intended to galvanize both his troops fighting the aliens and the audience watching in the theater, a speech my teacher found laughably histrionic. I didn’t think anything was overly wrong with it at the time. The thing with all these movies is that not only were they pure entertainment, I also saw nothing in them I recognized in my own life.

Jerry Maguire was the first movie I took appreciated that looked like real life. For example, there are living rooms in the movie—a lot of them, actually—and they looked recognizable. While everything was gorgeously lit, they looked like some place that existed on earth. The movie required from me no suspension of disbelief—I was a credulous believer from the opening shot.

Since the movie’s release, I’ve lowkey fought an inferiority complex about loving the movie so much. The movie has gotten an unfair reputation of being schmaltzy, a too-starry-eyed love story, full of catchphrases that were repeated so often that it’s hard to believe that they ever had real emotional force. On one hand, I shouldn’t feel embarrassed about it being my gateway movie to “higher” art. Everyone starts out loving something slick, something that goes down easy and is perhaps too pleasurable for its own good. Put simply, whoever says their love of cinema began with a Brakhage film is lying. One could do a lot worse than having Jerry Maguire be their ur-film from which an appreciation of art blossomed. It is not some tossed-off work by hacks. The consummate skill on display by every aspect of the production is something to be respected, if not admired. It is a sterling example of the highest caliber of film Hollywood can deliver, with the acting, cinematography, editing, writing, and directing all done at the highest level.

Those who pass it off as gooey, oversentimental, romanticized tripe are way off the mark as well. The movie has been consecrated as the standard bearer for modern romantic comedies for so long that people have assumed it shares with its inferior imitators the more saccharine trademarks of the genre. On the contrary, the meet-cute with the two leads doesn’t involve some magically aligned set of circumstances leaving no doubt that fate (or the screenwriter’s pen) has preordained our couple to be each other’s perfect complement. In Jerry Maguire, it’s a leap of faith based on one’s admiration of the other’s integrity, a meet-“I will go with you” that has equal parts uncertainty and resolve. This is a little hard to see on the first few viewings, or at least it was for me. When I listened to the audio commentary Crowe did for the movie roughly five years after the release (joined by Tom, Renee, and Cuba), he mentioned that the ending did literally have the couple walking off into the sunset, but there was no telling if the relationship would last, and a lingering sense of uncertainty remained. I scoffed at this comment, and passed it off as an artist trying to add a layer of depth to his film that didn’t exist. But that’s because I was so invested in their relationship and wanted with every fiber of my being for it to work out. I saw Jerry’s grand pronouncements in the living room at the end as a heartfelt romantic gesture, instead of the last ditch effort by someone who “can’t be alone” and doesn’t “like to give up” it could very well be. There are plenty of things in the movie to support the idea that Jerry is someone characterized more by a fear of being alone than he is by being a conduit for love. The things he said in that living room would be the same words spoken by a person desperate to keep someone—anyone—around, just so he wouldn’t have to face the highs and lows of his life alone. He’s like a person who’s drowning: panicked and thrashing, latching on to the nearest body and taking them down with him. He’s done it before (“What if we got married?”) and he’ll do it again. And Dorothy Boyd, that paragon of optimism and hope and unabashed passion and love, reveals herself in that moment as well, as someone who possesses that potentially self-destructive trait that often accompanies a capacity for headlong, loyal, pure, all-consuming love: eternal forgiveness. “You had me at hello”—depending on who you say it to—is either the most romantic thing one can say or a powerless admission that will consign both parties to a life of misery. For it’s obvious by the end: no matter how many times Jerry screws up, Dorothy will take him back. She—and the romantics in the audience—are counting on the fact that he’s changed. But people rarely do, and if he’s still that desperate person hiding under a tenuous veneer of temporarily-won confidence, he will mess up again. And the cycle will repeat again, and again, and again. The man incapable of love and the woman who loves him is a tragedy, in the end. Crowe wisely ends the movie before we know for sure, but the suggestions have been planted, giving the movie unprecedented depth for a film that looks every bit like a typical romantic comedy or the kind of movie that is usually populated with characters whose emotions and motivations are clear and have unambiguous intent. Jerry Maguire is much deeper than anyone gives it credit for, including me for the first few years. And I loved it. I am so glad it’s become a movie that’s grown with me, and I’m pretty close to losing any trace of the slight embarrassment I had when declaring it an all-time favorite.