Jerry Maguire, a slick, high-flying sports agent working for a giant company has doubts about the ethics of his industry. When he proposes there is a better, kinder way for taking care of clients he is fired. But one co-worker and a sole client believe in him. Cruise was deservedly nominated for an Academy Award for his energetic performance in this funny and heart-warming romantic sports drama. His performance is passionate, earnest and infectious, ensuring this soothing golden balm of film stays with you long after the credits have rolled.
SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
A contemporary review
The director Cameron Crowe is maturing at the same rate as the characters whose lifestyles he has chronicled. After high school (depicted in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which Crowe scripted from his own book, and in his directorial debut Say Anything) and the twentysomething Seattle scene (in Singles), he reaches pre-mature midlife crisis and finally comes of age as a filmmaker with Jerry Maguire. Though the film eventually builds to a conventional Hollywood climax – Rod Tidwell is signed by the Arizona Cardinals, while his vindicated agent Jerry realises that success means nothing without love – Crowe’s script takes some unexpected turns on the way there. For a start, Jerry’s conversion from ‘just another shark in a suit’ to man with a mission statement, which many Hollywood writers might have made the meat of their story, is dispatched in the first five minutes.
Thereafter, it’s Jerry’s increasingly flailing effort to get himself back on track, professionally and emotionally, which occupies centre stage. A very fluent writer of dialogue, Crowe defines his central character through a succession of terrific speeches in which Jerry seems to be trying to convince himself, as much as his listeners, of his love, idealism, commitment or business acumen. But every time Crowe seems in danger of being carried away by his own eloquence, he finds a way to deflate it. For instance, in Jerry’s final reconciliation scene with Dorothy (Renée Zellweger), played incongruously in front of the divorced women’s support group who congregate at the home of Dorothy’s sister Laurel, Jerry is in full flow when Dorothy cuts him off with the words, ‘You had me from “Hello”’.
Ultimately, though, it’s not any great novelty in conception or technique that makes Jerry Maguire stand out. It’s simply that, unlike so many big, mainstream studio movies, it delivers all that it promises – comedy, romance, satire and American football – with a consistent sophistication and lightness of touch, and a whole gallery of brilliantly sketched incidental characters, such as Chad the jazz-obsessed babysitter. Jerry’s relationship with Dorothy is refreshingly complex: responding to the devotion and loyalty she has displayed, he feels that he has a duty to love her. Dorothy later confronts Jerry with the realisation that while he loves her six-year-old son Ray (another Hollywood pothole, the cute kid, here effortlessly negotiated by Crowe and the young Jonathan Lipnicki), he merely likes her. Jerry’s overdeveloped sense of personal responsibility, a fine thing in his dealings with Rod Tidwell, becomes something of a liability as the basis for a marriage. And despite the feelgood ending, there’s no real reason to believe that Jerry and Dorothy’s problems are at an end, when they are reunited; it’s possible that he has just convinced himself he loves her out of his reluctance to lose.
The role of Jerry wasn’t written specifically for Tom Cruise (Tom Hanks was Crowe’s first choice), but it suits his glossy screen persona perfectly, and significantly deepens it, bringing out the panic in his trademark nervous energy and the emotional repression in his clean-cut, curiously asexual romantic image. There’s one great scene where Jerry and Dorothy are eating out with Rod (Cuba Gooding Jr) and his equally irrepressible wife Marcee (Regina King), who launch into a very physical display of affection which Jerry vainly tries to match by kissing Dorothy chastely first on the hand, then on the forehead. It’s almost as if at the start of the film, Jerry is the regular Tom Cruise – the slick, cocky operator who gets what he wants – and as it progresses, the layers are stripped off.
At one stage, as his clients desert him and his deals go awry, it looks like Jerry Maguire may be a Willy Loman for the 90s. The happy ending, of course, undermines that, and also the film’s earlier attack on the greed of players and their agents. ‘This isn’t show friends, it’s show business,’ snaps Bob Sugar, the former friend who poaches Jerry’s clients. The sense that Crowe’s satire is aimed as much at Hollywood, another business run by agents, is strangely mirrored by recent reports in the US press that a letter by Walt Disney Company CEO Michael Eisner, exhorting his troops to more honourable business practices, may have been rather closely ‘inspired’ by the text of Jerry’s mission statement. Rod, whom Jerry has criticised for playing for money rather than love of American Football, is eventually rewarded not just with a crucial touchdown, but also with a new contract beyond his wildest dreams. So Jerry’s idiosyncratic, humane way of representing clients turns out to be very sound business practice after all, no doubt netting him a healthy percentage of Rod’s $11.2 million.
John Wrathall, Sight and Sound, March 1997
Jerry Maguire
Director: Cameron Crowe
©: TriStar Pictures Inc.
Production Companies: TriStar Pictures, Gracie Films
Executive Producer for Gracie Films: Bridget Johnson
Producers: James L. Brooks, Laurence Mark, Richard Sakai, Cameron Crowe
Co-producers: Bruce S. Pustin, John D. Schofield
Associate Producers: Lisa Stewart, J. Michael Mendel
Unit Production Manager: Andrew Stone
Production Office Co-ordinator: Susan Dukow
Location Managers: Frawley Becker, Andrew Ullman, Katherine Kallis
2nd Unit Director (Football Sequences): Allan Graf
1st Assistant Director: Jerry Ziesmer
2nd Assistant Director: Warren Turner
Script Supervisor: Joanie Blum
Casting: Gail Levin
Screenplay: Cameron Crowe
Director of Photography: Janusz Kaminski
Director of Photography (2nd Unit/Football Sequences): Chuck Cohen
Camera Operator: Mitch Dubin
Camera Operators (2nd Unit/Football Sequences): Stephen Andrich, Donald Marks
Computer Graphics Imagery/Video Display: Banned From The Ranch Entertainment
Special Visual Effects: Cinesite Inc
Special Effects Co-ordinator: Paul Haines Jr
Editor: Joe Hutshing
Co-editor: David Moritz
Additional Editor: Gabriel Wrye
Production Designer: Stephen Lineweaver
Art Directors: Virginia Randolph, Clayton Hartley
Set Decorator: Clay A. Griffith
Illustrator: John Johnson
Costume Designer: Betsy Heimann
Costume Supervisors: Linda Matthews, Lori Stilson, James Lapidus
Make-up Supervisor: Michèle Burke-Winter
Make-up Artist: Carrie Angland
Hair Supervisors: Linda Arnold, Michael White
Titles: Pacific Title
Music: Nancy Wilson
Music Supervisor: Danny Bramson
Music Editor: Carl Kaller
Sound Mixer: Jeff Wexler
Re-recording Mixers: Paul Massey, Doug. M. Hemphill, Rick Kline
Supervising Sound Editors: Mike Wilhoit, Wylie Stateman
Sound Effects Editors: Tony Lamberti, Hector Gika, Jon Title, Randy Kelley
Stunt Co-ordinator: Allan Graf
Cast
Tom Cruise (Jerry Maguire)
Cuba Gooding Jr (Rod Tidwell)
Renée Zellweger (Dorothy Boyd)
Kelly Preston (Avery Bishop)
Jerry O’Connell (Frank Cushman)
Jay Mohr (Bob Sugar)
Regina King (Marcee Tidwell)
Bonnie Hunt (Laurel Boyd)
Jonathan Lipnicki (Ray Boyd)
Todd Louiso (Chad the nanny)
Mark Pellington (Bill Dooler)
Jeremy Suarez (Tyson Tidwell)
Jared Jussim (Dicky Fox)
Benjamin Kimball Smith (Keith Cushman)
Ingrid Beer (Anne-Louise)
Jann Wenner (Scully)
Nada Despotovich (Wendy)
Alexandra Wentworth (Bobbi Fallon)
Aries Spears (Tee Pee)
Kelly Coffield (Jan)
Alice Crowe (Alice)
Larina Adamson, Winnie Holzman, Diana Jordan, Susan Norfleet, Susan Pingleton, Cha-Cha Sandoval, Hynden Walch (women’s group members)
Glenn Frey (Dennis Wilburn)
Donal Logue (Rick, junior agent)
Tom Gallop (Ben)
Beaumont Bacon (Cleo)
Lisa Amsterdam (Patricia Logan)
Angela Goethals (Kathy Sanders)
Leslie Upson (flight attendant)
Rick Johnson (John Swenson)
Lightfield Lewis (room service waiter)
Jerry Cantrell (Jesus of CopyMat)
Toby Huss (Steve Remo)
Drake Bell (Jesse Remo)
Christine Cavanaugh (Mrs Remo)
Russel Lunday (doctor)
Eric Stoltz (Ethan Valhere)
Lamont Johnson (weepy athlete)
Brent Barry (Calvin Nack)
Rod Tate (‘Baja’ Brunard)
Charlie Cronin, Theo Greenly (hootie fans)
Beau Bridges (Matt Cushman) *
USA 1996
139 mins
Digital 4K
*Uncredited
The screening on Sat 10 May will be introduced by Kimberley Sheehan, Season Programmer
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
Questions/comments? Contact the Programme Notes team by email