Nicole Kidman kept the nose she wore in The Hours. But of course – that few centimetres won her an Oscar, vanquishing the final Days of Thunder ghosts. Kidman proved her thespian chops as the terminally miserable Virginia Woolf, a performance that required smoking spindly hand rolled cigarettes and staring blankly out of windows. She blinked and puffed while The Nose proved she was willing to sacrifice her good looks for Art.
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MORE: Tom Cruise’s life of Scientology to $926m empire exposed
Her ex-husband Tom Cruise seems to have thought he was onto his own equivalent with his new movie, Digger. Fat-suited, prosthetic jowls in place and glued into layers of silicone, his performance as oil baron Digger Rockwell was probably pitched to him in a meeting where a hair-transplanted ersatz Ari Gold solemnly whispered, “Oscar bait”. Instead what Cruise has on his hands today is a stinker of industrial sewage plant proportions.
The movie cost a reported $358 million to make and market and yet earned $28.7 million globally on its opening weekend, making it the biggest box office disaster of his nearly 50-year career.
Meanwhile, critics have nearly universally panned Cruise’s hammy oil man bit in which his Digger dances with a shovel and prances around in cowboy boots. There are some holdouts who have argued that the movie’s massive twist is a brilliant masterstroke making Digger, as the Guardian put it, a “misunderstood masterpiece”.
For the last 15 years, Cruise has religiously made big-budget, blow-’em-up action movies, and the pathos of him taking on Digger is undeniable; it feels like a bit of a needy grab to try and get himself one of those nice gold men for his mantelpiece. For now, his 2004 awarding of Scientology’s rare Freedom Medal of Valour medal will just have to sit on its lonesome.
But here’s a nice little bit of irony: While Cruise suffers through the humiliation of Digger’s mauling and a box office sputtering so terrible it’s become its own story, his ex-wives have never been doing better.
There is Kidman, freshly divorced from Keith Urban and his purse-sized hair straightener. While the rizz-deficient guitar-strummer is exploring the exciting new options in mousse, Kidman has gotten herself a super wealthy chap and they have been off to Italy so she could be swoonily adored on a sun lounger while sipping a spritz.
Meanwhile, her career is in pretty decent form. After a nice spate of critical successes – Baby Girl and Expats – she’s onto the third season of reasonably reviewed Lioness, while Practical Magic 2 managed to crawl past the $US100 million mark. Not exactly a bang-up hit but no one is writing stories but it being a total fizzer either.
Then we have Mrs Cruise part deux (technically wife number three, with Cruise having had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it late 80s marriage to actress Mimi Rogers) Katie Holmes, who has also been enjoying her own molto romantico holiday. For the last month, Holmes has been on a Euro tear with her new chap, artist Jason Bard Yarmosky. Tour her Instagram and her numerous carousels of the couple’s lovey, wine-sipping boat trips bobbing around Lake Como will leave you green-eyed.
That, of course, is in between the fact that Holmes’ It Girl-ish-ness has been reaffirmed after having frow-ed her way across Milan and Paris fashion weeks.
Which is to say, life seems to be just swell for Mrs Cruise one and Mrs Cruise two.
Meanwhile their ex-husband’s career is, Digger aside, a Groundhog Day of him playing parts that perennially require him to wear black leather jackets while diffusing nuclear bombs or flying a fighter jet.
And that’s fine, just fine. His Mission: Impossible franchise are tremendously enjoyable action flicks that do what they say on the tin and have grossed $6.2 billion. We, the audience, have agreed to no longer quite wonder how his Ethan Hunt keeps ensnaring the googley-eyed attentions of 30-something love interests despite Hunt having blown past the CIA’s mandatory retirement age of 60.
But if you remove Mission: Impossible (and Top Gun and his egregious The Mummy) from the equation, what is Cruise’s image? The exact same one as the one he was peddling, peddling during the dying days of the Clinton administration: Action-man-heartthrob who every two years is linked to his latest co-star, relationships that feel about as genuine as any union can be dreamed up over a Californian conference table by ideating capped tooth talent agents.
Take away the fact he will ride a motorbike off a cliff at the age most people are discovering orthopaedic insoles and he is a total void.
Aside from his masochistic willingness to hurtle himself off planes/buildings/moving trains so he can perennially remind us he does his own stunts, the only thing we know about him is devotion to a religion that began when tyrannical Xenu ruled the galactic confederation 75 million years ago. (Xenu, in case you are wondering, is currently imprisoned in a wire cage on Earth near an unspecified volcano.)
Aside from Cruise, as far as we know, spending his days having his Thetans upped (or are they meant to go down?) and reviving his glory days’ franchises (next up, Days of Thunder 2 with Anne Hathaway) and what is left is something a bit sad about 2026 Tom, a man who has not moved on or evolved in any way since the OJ Simpson trial was the talk of the town. In September, to promote Digger, he gave his first major longform interview in years, speaking to GQ, in which he is photographed with his shirt open, tousle bed hair and his hand casually yanking down the waistband of his jeans, all of which feels a bit Tom Ford-ed Norma Desmond. Cruise, his shirt flapping open, has the ick of seeing a friend’s recently divorced father just getting out of the shower.
The story itself is like candy floss – it dissolves upon contact. How does he feel having just turned 64? “It means I’m 64.” What does he do when he’s not on set filming? “I’m preparing for the next.” Throughout the piece he utters sentences that read like English-as-a-second-language conversational practice: “I’m living my life and I have, always, dreams”.
“I see possibilities. I see future … There’s so many things that I enjoy and like doing and I’m interested in.”
“I have personal goals and challenges with everything I do.”
Kim Jong-un is more scrutable and willing to share of himself. At least when he frogmarches a general out into a field to take them out using aircraft ordnance he is willing to let us see that he feels something.
And maybe that’s what makes the whole Digger fiasco that much sadder; in taking on this highly unusual sort of role for himself, Cruise was telling us something. That despite his money and fame and perfect teeth he still craves proper critical yes-you-can-act success and approval; that he wants his “You really like me” Sally Field Oscar moment.
Bet you this: Kidman still has The Nose all these years on and Cruise has dropped his Digger fat suit into the nearest volcano.
Daniela Elser is an editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with Australia’s leading media titles.