1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 26: Jerry Maguire
JERRY: “What do you know about dating a single mother?”Certain processes – like riding a bicycle or living out a marriage – take you through four stages, writes C.S. Lewis in “Talking about Bicycles.”
ROD: “Plenty! … Single mothers don’t date. They’ve been to the circus, they’ve been to the puppet show, and they’ve seen the strings.”
(1) When you’re very young, you’re uninterested in the process (call it X).
(2) You grow up a bit and become naïvely romantic about X. You discover its first exhilarations.
(3) After a while, you discover the hardship that goes along with X. You become cynical. If you continue to value X, you do so only instrumentally: you ride a bicycle or stick through marriage only to accomplish a further goal. X itself, you regard as regrettable labor.
(4) Your romantic feelings reassert themselves so that you again value X for its own sake, even if what seems worthwhile about X is never fully realized. You’re glad to have fleetingly approximated, or even to have just glimpsed, the ideals associated with X.
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A lot of movies are about one stage or another, or about the transition between two adjacent stages. The protagonists in Cameron Crowe’s movies tend to move all the way from (2) to (3) to (4).
In Say Anything, they spend the bulk of the story in (2) (the characters are teenagers in love). The brief transition to (3) is devastating. The conclusion in stage (4) is hopeful.
Elizabethtown is about a last-ditch effort to save a man from committing suicide after he’s stumbled from (2) into (3). His guardian angel spends the movie enticing him to enjoy living, as opposed to living in order to enjoy success. Through her love, the angel tries to bring the protagonist to (4).
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Jerry Maguire is about the processes of loving and building a rewarding career.
Like Elizabethtown, it’s a fairy tale without the supernatural trappings. There isn’t even a guardian angel – unless you count Ray, a cherubic little boy who can throw a baseball really, really, far.
Ray’s single mother is Dorothy (Renée Zellweger). Her face is fresh; her voice is deep. She’s been to the circus, seen the puppet show, and learned about the strings. She begins the movie in stage (3).
Dorothy and Ray live with Dorothy’s even more jaded sister. A divorced women’s support group regularly meets in their house. Such groups may be invaluable in real life, but this group is an object of gentle mockery. This story is weighted toward comedy, i.e., toward mature happiness; stage (3), the cynical stage, may evince greater maturity than stage (2), but it’s not yet as wise as stage (4).
(I analyze too much. The crucial point is that the divorced women’s group functions as a kind of naysaying chorus. This is a funny touch.)
Dorothy is an accountant in a cutthroat L.A. sporting agency. One of the agents, a hotshot named Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise), is having a crisis of conscience. He’s suddenly realized that he’s been urging his clients to maximize earnings rather than well-being. He graduates from stage (1) to stage (2): from now on, he’ll get his kicks doing what’s right, representing fewer athletes but attending more closely to their needs. Jerry writes a tract with the precious title “The Things We Think But Do Not Say: The Future of Our Business” and distributes it to his colleagues. They pretend to love it. Then they fire him from the agency. Jerry’s clients also abandon him.
But his idealism isn’t without effect. It inspires Dorothy to go with him, and, together, they form their own sporting agency.
One client stays with Jerry and Dorothy. This is NFL wide receiver Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.). Rod is personally warmhearted but professionally cynical; his team has never paid him what he deserves. As he seeks a new contract, his one directive to Jerry is: SHOW ME THE MONEY.
This is one of the movie’s great catchphrases. Here are others:
BROKE, BROKE, BROKE.
HELP ME HELP YOU.
YOU COMPLETE ME.
YOU HAD ME AT HELLO.
(How does one movie generate so many of them?)
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Another good line – not a catchphrase, exactly (though maybe it should be) – is Jerry’s confession to Rod: I SHOPLIFTED THE POOTIE. Jerry and Dorothy have become romantically involved, and each worries that s/he is taking advantage of the other (Jerry of Dorothy because she’s a single mother; Dorothy of Jerry because he’s at a professional low point). As they negotiate these doubts, their relationship moves from (2) to (3): out of idealism, into drudgery.
Meanwhile, Rod is stuck in his own stage (3). He’s a “paycheck player,” griping his way through the season, wondering why he isn’t being offered the big bucks. “That is not what inspires people,” Jerry tells him.
Will Rod rediscover his love of the game?
Will Dorothy and Jerry learn to love each other for who they are?
Of course they will. This is a comedy/fairy tale. But it’s a clever one. What makes it sweet and fun is how large all the gestures are, how each character moves along his or her journey with reckless abandon, overcoming bruises, brushing aside mistakes. (In this way, it’s rather like Moonstruck.) Dorothy, Jerry, and Rod are worth rooting for because each of them is bold. Jerry loses his job because of his vision. Dorothy leaves her job to be with Jerry because, she says, she just wants to be inspired. When Rod complains that Jerry isn’t trying hard enough to represent him, Dorothy scolds him with her deep voice, telling him that Jerry is doing all he can for Rod while he himself is BROKE, BROKE, BROKE. Jerry, in turn, begs to Rod: HELP ME HELP YOU. HELP ME HELP YOU. HELP ME HELP YOU. And Rod digs it. SHOW ME THE MONEY! he screams to Jerry.
The greatest lines, of course, are YOU COMPLETE ME and YOU HAD ME AT HELLO – lines of pure cheese. You know they’re coming. You steel yourself against them. But in the scene in which they’re uttered, they’re powerful (and very funny, since they rebuke the cynical onlookers). The characters have earned the right to say those lines. You can’t help but be moved. It’s as if the movie was designed in reverse, starting with those lines, with the rest of the story built around them to make them plausible.
The movie also depicts a talk show host who specializes in getting athletes to cry. They go onto his show resolved not to cry, but he figures out how to tug their heartstrings and they cry anyway. That’s what this movie tries to do. It works very hard. It earns our tears. It reminds us to believe in ideals. That’s why this popcorn flick is one of the best movies of 1996.