Kimihiro Reizei’s blog

Jerry Maguire (1996)

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Tom Cruise is in top form playing Jerry Maguire, a slick sports agent
with a heart. It’s built around whether or not you believe a self-absorbed
aggressive sports agent like Jerry Maguire could overnight find spiritual
redemption in his work after he has a twinge of conscience. What makes
it easier to swallow is that the Jerry Maguire character is just asking
to be a little better than the rotten character he realizes he has become
and that he does not turn completely pious and unbelievable on us as he
continues in the same line of work with just a little more care for others. 

The high-flying Los Angeles agent, working for the corporate powerhouse
SMI (Sports Management International), with 72 pro sports clients he pampers
and tries to get commercials for to supplement their huge pro salaries,
suddenly on one sleepless night feels compelled after thinking to himself
“Who had I become? Just another shark in a suit?” to send his company and
all staff members a glossy memo he entitles “The Things We Think and Do
Not Say: The Future Of Our Business.” In it Jerry suggests they should
seek fewer clients, care less about the money and have a more caring approach.
After a week of sending the memo, Jerry is fired.

Jerry goes from a winner to a loser overnight, as he discovers that
his career-orientated ruthless fiancée Avery Bishop (Kelly Preston)
ditches him. That his colleagues who cheered him as a hero when they first
read the memo, desert him as soon as he’s fired. That his protege-nemesis
Burt Sugar (Jay Mohr) steals practically all his clients and bad mouths
him while working the cell phone. The only client that remains with him
is Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.), who is his most unappealing one. He’s
the loud-mouth, arrogant, malcontent, undersized, egotistical, second-string
wide receiver of the Arizona Cardinals, who is looking to make one last
killing in the last year of his contract by resurrecting his career with
the help of his caring agent. 

What Jerry now has going for him is that single mum bookkeeper Dorothy
Boyd (Zellweger), with her young son (Jonathan Lipnicki), has slavishly
fallen in love with him over his idealistic decision and is willing to
go the extra-mile to support her lover boy as she quits her steady job
with the agency to be his entire office staff—she even takes it upon herself
to apologize for his mistakes, and they get married. 

What remains memorable about this crowd-pleasing but shallow romantic
comedy, viewed as a clever moral fable, is the breezy contemporary catchphrase
Cruise uses of  “show me the money.” Since, as far as I could see,
Maguire never really breaks with the money-oriented success formula that
his former agency swears to, his diatribes against the agency’s cynicism
and his moral rebirth seems almost meaningless. But again, if viewed as
solely in the context of the sports world, writer/director/co-producer
Cameron Crowe (”Say Anything…” /”Singles”/ “Vanilla Sky”) keeps it real,
energetic and right on the money. He gives us an old-fashioned Hollywood
romantic charmer that’s updated with modern touches such as interracial
friendships and a main character who might still be a shark in a suit but
is at least willing to be introspective about his darker side (which I
assume is not very common among sports agents).

It earned an Academy Award for Cuba Gooding Jr. and provided a breakthrough
role for Renee Zellweger.

Sin comentarios »

RSS feed para los comentarios de esta entrada. TrackBack URI

Dejar un comentario

Debes iniciar sesión para comentar.