At Slate Stephen Metcalf takes a long, hard look at Tom Cruise's careerâ and it isn't pretty.
I can't name another American icon who has been so popular, and for so long, and yet so hard to like, and for so long. (When the studio sent the then-mostly unknown Cruise to Paul Brickman, the writer-director of Risky Business, Brickman recoiled, saying, "This guy's a killer. Let him do Amityville 3.") But note a curious fact about his career: It maps perfectly onto the 25-year bull market in stocks that, like Cruise, is starting to show its age. Nascent in the early '80s, emergent in 1983, dominant in the '90s, suspiciously resilient in the '00s, and, starting in 2005, increasingly prone to alarming meltdowns.
Metcalf's dissection of Cruise's first big filmâRisky Businessâmade me want to watch that film again, and not just for the TWs scene. Read the whole thing here.
