Tom Cruise has forgotten how to act

There’s a moment in Digger, the new film starring Tom Cruise, in which Cruise’s character is staring contemplatively into a mirror. It’s clearly intended as a quiet moment of self-reflection, a pause in a film that is all about loud, crude, supersized swagger. It’s a film in which Cruise has undergone a startling body transformation to appear unrecognisably flabby and decrepit, prosthetic jowls hanging around his shoulders as he barks and monologues in an ostentatious southern drawl, a selfish, ageing oil baron carelessly igniting an apocalypse, one of the world’s greatest movie stars showcasing his most brazen performance in decades, presumably in pursuit of that Best Actor Oscar he still doesn’t have. But the mirror moment (and what it represents) doesn’t land. It’s limp and saggy, like those jowls. Why? I think it’s because Cruise is just so intensely Tom Cruisey, even in his quietest moments, that it is simply no longer possible to see him as a – how else to put this? – good actor. I’m not even sure he sees himself as a good actor, so much as a meticulous actor, and that’s not quite the same thing. “I’m not a halfway kind of person,” he recently told GQ magazine, in a weird and rambling interview. As Cruise stares at his own reflection (I can’t explain this fully for spoiler reasons, but let’s just say, there’s a giant, Tom Cruise-sized meta-narrative trick at play in that mirror gaze), all I can see is the “last movie star” Tom Cruise carefully working out how to quietly, contemplatively stare at a mirror. You can practically see the script notes: “This is the bit, Tom – the bit where you show your range”. Tom Cruise in ‘Digger’. ‘He has become less an actor, more a legend,’ writes Francesca Steele It’s like watching that kid who always got the good drama roles at school do his first Shakespeare. You know they can act, but you can’t quite buy into it anymore because of all that acting. I’m not saying that Cruise could never act. He could. He’s always loved to be loud and entertaining (Risky Business! Top Gun!) but he has over the years shown us plenty of those arguably smaller, technically more challenging performances where, deprived of his usual and quite considerable charisma, he displays an immense gift for communicating internal trauma or supporting role flair. People often cite his Oscar-nominated performance as the grotesque men’s guru Frank in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, and indeed his transformative interview with Gwenovier is tremendous. But I’m particularly fond of Cruise at the beginning of Eyes Wide Shut, where we watch his character’s ego deflate silently as his wife confesses sexual desires outside the marriage. Quiet, revealing, mesmerisingly still. Now though, Cruise has become less an actor, more a legend. Digger, directed by multi-Academy Award-winner Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant), is his first non-franchise film in nearly a decade. Mission Impossible, Top Gun, Jack Reacher. The man who rides motorbikes off cliffs and deploys his own parachutes, the man who hangs off the back of airbuses as they take off. Cruise was nominated for an Oscar for his role in ‘Magnolia’ (Photo: New Line Cinema) Also, lest we forget, a seemingly mad scientologist, who jumps on sofas and now has two deeply strange and secretive divorces to his name, a man with so many rumours circling his private life that he hardly does interviews anymore, and the writer behind the GQ one has even had to do his own interviews explaining why he didn’t ask Cruise about scientology. (He says he didn’t think it was “interesting”; one might conclude regardless that publicists forbade it.) Naturally, it’s hard to separate all this from the man we see on screen. Even the mega publicity tour surrounding the release of Digger has leant into the Cruise hype; in July, a trailer for the film featured a two-minute montage of Cruise’s past performances, plus a tiny clip of the new film at the end. And it’s only fair to acknowledge, too, that Digger is meant to be a tricksy farce with a gigantic twist, and some of the tonal challenges here are not its actors’ fault. And yet, this is about more than just colossal celebrity colliding unfavourably with our ability to see past it, or about script flaws. As Digger Rockwell, a man so self-satisfied he compares a dangerously detached ice cap to his own manhood, Cruise is himself too smug, too self-aware, as if the acting is now subservient to the thinking about acting. Somewhere between climbing the Burj Khalifa and befriending the Royal Family, Cruise has drunk the Kool-Aid that tells him he is the saviour of cinema, the most meticulous on set, the one always honing his craft. Perhaps he is all those things. Perhaps he did once deserve his Oscar. But not this time. Not for a character and actor too big for their cowboy boots. A good actor keeps all that honing off screen. ‘Digger’ is in cinemas from Friday