12/13/96
MOVIE REVIEW: Jerry Maguire
Cruise is lovable as enlightened jerk

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

**** (out of five)
Starring Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding Jr., Renee Zellweger, Kelly Preston, Jerry O'Connell, Jay Mohr, Bonnie Hunt, Regina King, Jonathan Lipnicki. A TriStar picture written and directed by Cameron Crowe. Rated R, contains sex, nudity, profanity. Running time: 140 minutes.

Tom Cruise's Jerry Maguire might be the ultimate date-night movie.

This story about a wheeling-dealing sports agent who finds himself on the outs after calling for a kinder, gentler relationship with his high-priced football, basketball and baseball players will appeal to the guys.

The film's romantic aspects -- when a widowed underling in his office sees him as her white knight and follows him away to blaze new trails -- will appeal to gals.

And the problems they face in the rocky world of love in the '90s will appeal to both men and women.

Fortunately, Jerry Maguire is also good -- light and funny, but with real problems in career and marriage to battle. Cruise, who got mired in the complexities of the sometimes exciting, but nearly incomprehensible Mission: Impossible, scores impressively. I had forgotten how well he can do light romantic comedy and how much charm he can muster as a klutzy underdog. At one point in Jerry Maguire he wants to show determined resolve, but then trips and falls over himself.

You love to hate him
Jerry is one of those guys you love to hate -- the ones behind the push for astronomical sports salaries. But one day he pokes his head up from out of the rat race with his 72 clients and has an epiphany of conscience. "I hated my place in the world," he discovers.

So he puts his thoughts into a detailed and more-than-a-little pompous memo -- actually a position paper -- about how agents should concentrate more on individual clients, treat them as people and help them. Jerry's touchy-feely thoughts win the applause of his co-workers. But soon he's out the door.

He manages to rally only one person to leave with him -- the widowed Dorothy Boyd (Renee Zellweger), who takes a chance on Jerry. His prospects look dim -- only one of his clients, a whiny, demanding not-so-good football player named Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.) stays with him.

But for Dorothy, who has secretly fallen in love with Jerry -- he was kind to her and her young son at an airport once -- and who was inspired by his memo, it is the only choice. For Jerry, who likes Dorothy, but doesn't love her near as much as she loves him, it will open a new life.

The nice thing about writer director Cameron Crowe's film is that it deals with real-seeming people in plausible situations and isn't afraid to wrestle with the complex whims of romance. It is intelligent, breezily refreshing and sometimes very funny.

It doesn't pander to the audience, save in a maybe too-easy ending. But one can recognize the loves-me-loves-me-not crises that its characters must overcome. For that, it can sometimes be heartbreaking.

Filmmaker's time has come
Crowe doesn't turn out lots of movies. At the age of 16, he was writing for Rolling Stone; later, he went back to high school undercover to write the script for Fast Times at Ridgemont High. His films, Say Anything with John Cusack and Singles with Matt Dillon, didn't do huge business, but they caught the pulse of modern life.

For Jerry Maguire, Crowe has done that again, but this time he will probably reach a much bigger audience.

He has a knack for funny, offbeat situations and for focusing on the foibles of life. So there's Jerry shrieking "Show me the money!" into a telephone at the rah-rah urgings of Rod who wants more than to be a star of TV waterbed commercials out of his off-the-field career. And there's an amusing, rapid-fire montage that cuts between Jerry on the phone trying to persuade all his clients at the sports agency to go with him while, on another phone, his nemesis at the agency tries to hang onto those players.

In the middle of all this insanity there's Dorothy, the self-described "oldest 26-year-old in the world," who's so hungry for affection that she's almost in tears at the prospect of her first date with Jerry. Yet she's practical, too.

"I know this is a bad time," she tells Jerry as she nervously goes off with him to face an uncertain future, "but do you have a medical program?"

Zellweger charming
Zellweger, only seen previously in a string of low-budget, little-seen films, captures the tentative and nervous moments in modern romance. She's charming, not pushy. She holds back her emotions for fear they'll scare Jerry off. She makes Dorothy both very vulnerable and yet with a lot of love to give, a potent combination.

She gets lots of help in the latter from little Jonathan Lipnicki, a pint-sized charmer in glasses who plays her son and steals just about every scene he's in. He makes one love Dorothy all the more.

But it's Cruise's film and he does it light and boyishly -- only this brash boy next door is self-centered at the start. It's that sin that must be overcome during the film. Yet he's also very human, trapped by his high ideals. So we like him, see the potential in him and follow him like Dorothy.

Crowe has given each of them perfect foils to play off. Bonnie Hunt plays Dorothy's protective sister, who looks at Jerry with a cynical eye and seems to have a divorce support group constantly going on in her living room that is good for comic relief. That's the job, too, of Gooding as the loud-mouth who nevertheless proves to be a model of family love that Jerry so desperately needs to round out his life.