25 years ago, Tom Cruise gave his best performance in a divisive ’90s epic

Tom Cruise has spent the better part of the last 20 years making straightforward, widely appealing action movies. He’s become known just as much for the death-defying stunts he’s willing to do in films like Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning and Top Gun: Maverick as he is for his signature, capital-M Movie Star charisma. Action films have, of course, been an important part of Cruise’s career ever since it began in the 1980s, but there was a time when Hollywood’s most committed movie star seemed more willing to push himself emotionally and tonally as a performer than he is now.

That period of his filmography reached its highest point when Cruise gave the greatest performance of his career to date in writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson‘s gutsy L.A. epic Magnolia. Released the same year that Cruise gave another, wildly different performance in Stanley Kubrick‘s Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia features the Hollywood star as one figure in an ensemble cast of characters whose issues all come spilling messily and violently to the surface over the course of one rainy, inexplicable day in the San Fernando Valley. The film remains one of the more divisive masterpieces of the 1990s, but not only has Magnolia‘s reputation continued to improve in the 25 years since it was released, but Cruise’s performance also stands now as a stunning reminder of the full breadth of his talent.

The person you are versus the person you pretend to be

New Line Cinema

An ensemble epic made in the same vein as Robert Altman classics like Nashville and Short Cuts, Magnolia follows well over a dozen characters as their lives become unexpectedly linked together over the course of one 24-hour period by, among other things, a long-running quiz show, a dying Hollywood producer (Jason Robards), and a freak weather event that truly needs to be seen to be believed. At the center of its mass of interconnected stories is Cruise’s Frank T.J. Mackey, a chauvinistic pickup artist and male motivational speaker whose advice for dating women is so absurdly misogynistic that it might have been easy to dismiss him now as an overly cartoonish character had it not been for the rise of certain online men’s rights activists in recent years.

Over the course of Magnolia‘s first two hours, Frank gives a pair of motivational speeches to a conference room full of faceless men and participates in a TV interview with a female journalist (April Grace). In his first presentation, Frank is collected, charismatic, and unhinged in a way that perfectly suits his brand. He’s so outlandishly confident, in fact, that he’s first introduced by Anderson in a wide shot that frames him standing ominously in a spotlight before the words “seduce and destroy” appear on a banner behind him. Anderson’s knowing, comedic edge adds a lot to this scene, but not as much as Cruise’s trademark, full-throated commitment to his role. He plays Frank without a hint of irony, which just makes the character’s complete arc in Magnolia all the more satisfying to witness.

A complete dismantling

New Line Cinema

In his interview, Frank is taken aback by the level of research into his life that his interviewer has done. She asks him to talk about his relationships with his mother and his father, and then she proceeds to systematically poke holes in his lies. She tells him that she knows his mother actually died when he was still a young boy, that he took care of her before she did, and that he was then taken in by a female neighbor. This revelation shocks Frank and immediately puts him on a back foot in a development that Cruise beautifully plays with a sudden freeze of his movements and a slowing of his previously hyped-up glances around the room. Frank shuts down, resorting to silence and, as he says in one of Magnolia‘s most memorable moments, “silent judgment” until his allotted time for the interview runs out.

Frank lashes out at his interviewer and leaves the room in a hush — terrified and angry that his past, which he sees as a vulnerability and contradiction to the man he sells himself as now, has been exposed. When he returns to the conference room from earlier to finish his presentation, Frank breaks down. Frazzled, he tries to move forward, but ends up walking in circles, offering no real “wisdom,” but just opting for words and phrases that he knows will get a rise out of those listening. When he incorrectly tells his audience members to open their blue books rather than their white books, he instinctively screams “f**ing bulls**t” and flips a table. He has begun, like every other character in Magnolia, to unravel. This process reaches its culmination in a later scene when Frank begrudgingly visits his dying father, Robards’ Earl, whom he still resents for abandoning him and his mother when he was just a child.

Magnolia is about a lot of things: regret, trauma, loneliness, the relationships between parents and their children. One of its key themes, though, is about the disparity between who we are, who we want to be, and who we pretend to be. Frank desperately wants to be untouchable — someone so uncaring of women and unintimidated by other men that even the death of his mother and the abandonment of his father don’t bother him. But he’s just as vulnerable as anyone else, a fact that’s revealed not only in his disaster of an interview, but also in his years-in-the-making confrontation with his father. This scene, filmed and performed almost entirely in one unbroken take, begins with Frank sitting down at his father’s bedside and hurling insults at the old man — reminding him of the careless cruelty and roughness he exposed Frank to at a young age.

As Frank recounts how his dying mother “waited” for Earl to call and check on her, his emotions begin to overwhelm him. Again, he tries not to let his pain bubble to the surface, vowing even as tears start to spill from his eyes, “I am not going to cry for you … I want you to know I hate your f**ing guts.” His string of enraged words is broken up by his uncontrollable sobs, which give way to the real hurt that has been tormenting him his entire life, when Cruise suddenly asks with a tear-choked voice, “Why didn’t you call?” It’s an emotional breakdown so powerful that it actually moved Cruise’s other co-star, a nearby Philip Seymour Hoffman, to tears on set.

Magnolia is overflowing with unforgettable performances and cinematic moments. In Cruise’s Frank T.J. Mackey, though, the film finds its most powerful vessel for its ideas about pain, trauma, and catharsis. Frank breaks down and evolves more than any other character in Magnolia — beginning it a brash, loudmouthed misogynist and ending it a quiet, heartbroken man solely interested in comforting a woman he barely knows. Cruise, for his part, sells the slow disintegration of his character’s carefully crafted façade with so much confidence and unbridled vulnerability that it’s almost frightening to witness. The film was made at a time when it felt like he was hell-bent on capturing the Oscar he still hasn’t won. Twenty-five years later, it’s a powerful reminder that — even as he holds on tightly to his most recognizable franchises — Cruise is still one of the most gifted and versatile movie stars of his generation.

Magnolia is streaming now for free on Pluto TV.